There exists a nebulous category of game known as the 7/10. The elements of gameplay are sound, the graphics are pleasing, the music is nice, and whatever performances there are are acceptable. However, there is a certain something missing, an X factor, and the final product doesn't become more than the sum of its parts. The Outer Worlds, Mad Max, and Sleeping Dogs all count.

Tomb Raider is a strikingly average game that is difficult to love but hard to hate. Every aspect of it functions as intended, but there are no surprises in store and entire systems feel either half-baked or superfluous. The defining flaw is that every single attempt at drama or suspense falls flatter than a steamroller victim with an eating disorder on a planet home to heavy gravity.

I never watched the entirety of Shutter Island, but I recall Leonardo DiCaprio entering a building to a booming scare chord. The music was heavy throughout, and while I fell asleep halfway through, I believe the scare chord followed Leo when he tried taking a piss. Tomb Raider is a very loud game, full of sound and fury, but it comes to nothing at the end.

Content Breakdown

• 12 Hour Campaign
• 96 Collectibles
• 7 Tombs
• 84 "Challenges"

You play a boring and unlikable woman called Lara Croft. What makes her such a drag is that the story presents her as an ingenue archaeologist who wants to save her friends who are trapped on an uncharted island. The game, however, depicts her as a hardened killer who effortlessly mows down over 600 people inside of a weekend. The game and the story never reconcile these two very different Laras, and the result is a void where an interesting protagonist should be. I just can't give a shit about some wealthy British cow with dead parents who wants to play treasure-hunter. If the story leaned into and acknowledged her bloodthirsty nature then I might have perked up a bit. I think the older characterization of Lara worked better all round: a thrill-seeking, globe-trotting, femme fatale. That Lara's actions in both the story and cutscenes made perfect sense. This Lara is just a bore by comparison.

Lara's supporting cast are no better. They add no function to the gameplay and act purely as springboards to support Lara's awesomeness. A bunch of them die and evoke less pathos than a raccoon dipping their candy-floss into pond water. No element of the story rises above cliché, and none of the performances are able to elevate the material.

From beginning to end the game is unrelenting with the gunfights, explosions, gore, and Lara screaming when she hits another tree branch. The problem is that the game starts with the volume set to ten, leaving no room to escalate. If the first level has Lara suspended upside down in a cave full of desiccated corpses, then where can you go from there? There's the odd joke, but no sense of humour. I'm not asking for another Marvel quip-athon, but some degree of levity and self-awareness wouldn't have gone awry.

Observations

It is blatantly obvious that there was an entire prologue that got cut from the final product. The game begins with Lara escaping a sinking boat, washing up on shore, getting knocked out, waking up in a cave full of corpses, falling from a great height, and impaling herself on a length of rebar, all in the space of five minutes. None of the supporting cast get anything in the way of a proper introduction, and near the end of the game you explore the beached ship you arrived on. Since you never actually got to experience the ship the first time, you don't feel any emotion on the return trip and the whole sequence is a waste.

Tomb Raider tries to be a Metroid and it shouldn't have bothered. The levels are difficult to comprehend because they are visually dense and hard to parse. These shooting-galleries would be one-and-done missions in any other game, but Tomb Raider lets you backtrack through most of them. However, Lara does not have the move-set needed to navigate an open environment. She can't sprint, and she can only contextually interact with her surroundings to a highly scripted degree. There's no flow or momentum to attain, and no skill needed on the part of the player. You can certainly backtrack for a collectible you missed, but you won't be having any fun while you're at it.

Lara has her own version of Detective Vision, and it's fucking awful. You have to stand still for the effect to last, and every time you do there's an irritating sound-effect and headache-inducing screen-transition.

The entire upgrade system is redundant. It would be generous to say this game has any enemy types at all, since they all go down the same way. There are humanoid dudes who attack with guns, bows, and melee arms. Some of them have shields. That's everyone. The final four combat upgrades give you extra XP when kill enemies with the associated weapon. So you can earn extra XP, at the end of the game, when you're already nearing the XP cap, and will soon own every skill anyway.

The game has a ton of collectibles that get marked on the map. The game also has "challenges" which function the same way as collectibles except they don't get marked on the map. Even when you buy two fucking perks that mark everything else, the challenges still don't get logged. This is blatant padding and definitely the sloppiest piece of game-design on show.

There are seven, tiny, optional tombs to raid. No mummies or monsters to fight, just a simple physics puzzle and then you're done. These feel like a formality and without them I believe the developers would have felt pressure to call the game something else, like Lara Croft: The Faces of Evil.

Lara is a rubbish detective. The villain lays out his plan to her hours in advance, and Lara doesn't piece together this already solved jigsaw-puzzle until the final twenty minutes. Perhaps the many concussions Lara undergo have impaired her judgement. If a bad guy mailed her a bomb, she would conclude it's the exploding kind.

For some reason when you buy a capacity upgrade, the accompanying picture just shows Lara's arse.

I might as well note Rise of the Tomb Raider here because its not worth devoting its own review. The game doubles down on the open-world cruft despite not being open-world. Lara goes through the same arc as before. The entire game takes place in muddy Siberia, which makes the graphical-leap irrelevant. The final boss gets the drop on you and steals ALL your weapons. You are then forced to defeat him by throwing tin cans at his head. I was so fucking bored that I dropped the game midway, and only returned to finish that same playthrough two years later for completion's sake.

Conclusion

Tomb Raider is a safe, functional, linear campaign that uselessly tries to graft Metroid and RPG elements onto the formula. It's an easy recommend, but there's no substance to the experience and precious little to remember it by. The game will amuse you for ten hours but will fail to incite any kind of emotion. You won't be disgusted when Lara wades through waist-high raw sewage. You won't be scared when Lara gets throttled during yet another QTE. You won't be saddened when Lara's friend Trevor explodes at too young an age. You'll beat the game and quickly move on, as it is a polished but dull gem.

Tomb Raider ripped heavily from Uncharted this time around, but in future I feel the series could be rejuvenated by ripping off Resident Evil instead. Real tension doesn't come from fancy cinematics and endless gore, it comes from the stress of running low on resources in a police-station full of zombies and being chased by a waxy Dolph Lundgren wearing a hat. Absolutely nothing in Tomb Raider scared or exhilarated me because the game refused to let me deviate in anyway from the script.

Modern Tomb Raider already has the tech and the talent. All it needs to succeed as lasting art is a pulse.