Middle Child Woes
Welcome back, adventurer!
Great first acts are tough to follow. We’ve seen more, more, more before in this franchise, and unfortunately the sophomore effort of the Survivor trilogy is much of the same. It tries makes up for being the middle child by throwing Lara in increasingly bombastic situations, bordering on being Lara of Duty.

Yes, it still has elements such as crafting and pools of land to explore and tame introduced in the previous entry, but I feel like something was lost along the way. I hope to dive into this to see what was missing from this game and find a few points where things shine brighter than its predecessor.

Daddy Issues
Lara’s father plays a significant part in this game. Outside of a few mentions here and there, the largest part he’s played previously would be when Jon Voight played the father of Lara (performed by Voight’s daughter, Angelina Jolie). She trails her father’s footsteps after trying to grapple with the horrors of the previous game. While the beat-to-beat game doesn’t much touch upon on her struggle to cope, there are innumerable audio logs to listen through, one of the game’s first stumbles in my opinion.

Some of the logs found in Lara’s possession include recorded snippets of her therapy sessions. They’re interesting enough, but locking them to menus wastes the player’s time.

Rise delves into Lara’s history with her father, back when she was a clumsily- written child. She recalls one of her father’s White Whales, the lost city of Kitezh. Ana, Lord Croft’s exploration partner, warns Lara of his obsession and how it led to his ruin. Ana’s caution goes unheeded as Lara sets out on a search to find what her father couldn’t.

It’s a serviceable enough story, with enough intrigue and twists along the way to keep things interesting. Characters (namely Jonah) return from the reboot and help her during the expedition, though it took longer than I’d care to admit for me to recognize him as a returning character.

I’m not sure if it’s on me having a faulty memory as I slowly creep towards being a fossil myself, but I have a harder time remembering the auxiliary characters from the newer games. In fact, the characters I can name (such as faithful Winston, the goofy Uzi-toting skateboard kid, and the Atlantean businesswoman Natla) all stem from the first few games. It might also be a sign of trends in triple-A video game writing skewing towards being more…stock, for lack of a better word. Budgets climb as graphical horsepower increases, much of which is put to stunning work here in Rise, and publishers tend to become more risk-averse when a game costs the equivalent of several Croft Manors to create.

I get it, really I do, but let devs cook. Let them take risks. You never know what they’ll dream up if they do.

Lakes and Rivers
The bulk of Lara’s adventure is set in Siberia. Great attention is paid to how the snow reacts around her. This is the first game to grace the Xbox One and PlayStation 4, and once again takes great advantage of the new hardware. Brief mention should be made regarding the minor controversy surrounding the release of this game. At the time, it was announced to be an Xbox exclusive title, despite the franchise’s history and popularity on PlayStation. It was released on PC a few months later and PlayStation about a year after its initial launch in November 2015.

Landmass in the game is divided up into two kinds. There are “lakes” of tundra to explore and linear set pieces (“rivers”) centered around platforming or combat. Compounding the experiences from Tomb Raider, this game has larger swaths of land for Lara to explore as well as gather resources from. She lives off the fat of the land here, too, and must hunt and gather from her environment if she wants to gain the upper hand in combat. Upgrades are your standard fare; more accurate guns, boosted damage, et cetera.

Some of the local faction members will give Lara side-quests which will net her rewards. These side-quests include such classics as Clear Out the Wolf Den, Destroy Five Radio Towers, and Collect Four Mushrooms. Upgrade considerations aside, there’s absolutely no reason to help these hapless NPCs out. They’re the worst kind of side-quests in gaming; unadulterated filler. They add nothing to the overall plot, they’re not engaging, and whenever I decided to take one on I could feel my brain shift from drive to neutral.

What put me back into gear, though, were the new and improved optional tombs. It seems that Crystal Dynamics took feedback from the prior game. These tombs are more dynamic, sporting interesting puzzles with novel solutions. The rewards are worth it, too–ancient scrolls containing permanent enhancements to Lara’s abilities. It’s an upgrade in every sense of the word, and one of the biggest improvements from the prior game.

The latter half of the levels–the linear set pieces–are closer to what you’d expect from eighth-generation Tomb Raider fare. Both the platforming and the combat involve so many set pieces crumbling as Lara fights her way out it’s enough to make your head spin. I touched upon this in previous games, but Lara seems to have such little respect for the environment around her. Each artifact and amazing set piece she encounters has a very good chance of being blown up or destroyed. It’s sacrilege. To a person so interested in discovering and preserving the ancient unseen, she is certainly blasé when smashing through artwork or religious temples. Dusting off the same quote from the only archaeologist more famous than Lara: it belongs in a museum!

Countering this, there is something that Rise introduces which respects the ancient cultures she’s destroying. Scattered around the lakes are totems and monuments all written in different foreign languages–Greek, Mongolian, and Russian. As Lara finds these and reads them, her proficiency in that language increases. She can then use her translation skills to decipher monoliths which reveal the location of treasures.

It’s a relatively unique system, not just here in the Tomb Raider franchise but in gaming as a whole. I appreciate when a game goes out of its way to make language a mechanic. The only other example I can think of is within Kingdom Come: Deliverance, a game set in medieval times where your character’s illiteracy is a major hinderance.

Unfortunately much of this amounts to finding a few extra coin caches, nothing more. These caches can be alternatively found by wandering, which is something you’ll be doing on the regular if you choose to explore the “lakes”. What’s more, these coins have limited use, with only a single shopkeeper offering marginal upgrades to weapons Lara already owns. It’s a compelling system that I feel is squandered on something that isn’t crucial to the core experience.

The Divine Source
Well, after all this, what else happens in the story? Lara helps out the local militia in their fight against the evil Trinity group, led by the dying Ana and her brother Konstantin. They exude an uncomfortable vibe during cutscenes, as if they could kiss at any moment.

Lara’s friends get kidnapped at various points during the latter half of the game and things turn into a raging rapid of a river. Lara is accosted by a helicopter, endless waves of Trinity baddies, and mystic undead towards the end of the game. It’s standard fare for her at this point, and Konstantin serves as an easily cheesed final boss. In his dying breath, he admits that Lara’s father was murdered by Trinity. Lara vows revenge against them, setting up the conflict for the next game.

It’s honestly kind of a ho-hum ending. A dreary second-act ending to set up what will hopefully be a worthwhile payoff in the conclusion to the survivor trilogy. As a final teaser after the end credits roll, Ana and Lara are out in the Siberian tundra, when Lara asks a sickly Ana if she killed her father. Ana tells her that she didn’t, that she loved Richard Croft too much.

She’s then taken out by a sniper who is instructed to hold off on killing Lara for the time being. Why? I’ll have to find out in the next game, I guess.

Rise is competent, but it says something that I’m already wanting a new direction with the franchise after only two games of the survivor era. Being so close to modern gaming plays a large part in this desire. I could go to a game store, close my eyes, and pick out a title which would likely give me a similar experience to what I had with Rise.

Baba Yaga Blues
There isn’t much more to say about the bulk of the game, but there are still the DLCs to cover. They were released a little while after the game had launched and they’re worth talking about. Well, two out of the three of them are at least.

First, there are the returns of the Stately Croft Manor. It again sticks Lara in her home, but it’s the most unique and compelling content in the game for me. It’s almost like listening to a sparse song, where lyrics bubble up and you can savor each verse.

In Blood Ties, Lara is moving out of her childhood home, due to circumstances brought up later on in the scenario. There’s no combat here, just Lara and her ghosts. It works like a micro Metroidvania, where Lara’s equipment gates her progression through the manor. She rediscovers and comments on her past. It’s cathartic to her, much like the therapy sessions experienced in the game proper. Her voice actress sounds noticeably tired during this segment, though, like she was about to leave for the day but they called her back at the last second to record this DLC.

There were a few callbacks which put a grin on my face, though, namely a little note from faithful Winston, complaining about how Lara locked him in the freezer. There’re so many clever puzzles, so much buildup as Lara finally makes her way to the core of the manor and the family tomb.

It’s not nearly as awkward as the next bit of DLC, Lara’s Nightmare. It also takes place in Lara’s manor, though it’s not so much a new piece of storytelling as it is a score attack–something meant to be played repeatedly to get a high score and nothing else. She dreams that the manor is overrun by zombies and floating skulls which she has to dispatch in order to free herself from the nightmare.

A determined player could probably breeze through it in less than ten minutes. It took me around fifteen to clear the scenario. Overall there’s honestly not much to say about it, as I think it’s meant to be that aforementioned score attack mode, nothing more.

The last, though, is tied into the main game instead of the separate main menu options for the latter two.
The Baba Yaga is, as you may already know, a part of Slavic mythology– typically a witch who among other things is frequently depicted in modern media as traveling in a hut on chicken legs. You see the hut in the extra content, and it’s spectacular in its portrayal.

Lara is tasked with reuniting a family fractured by the Baba Yaga. Lara ventures into a cave, where she is exposed to a hallucinogenic pollen. This pollen creates visions of her father’s suicide. She can’t continue through the imagined labyrinth, and must conjure up an antidote if she is to continue.

Lara eventually does, and she’s able to see through the Baba Yaga’s veil. She defeats the woman posing as the Baba Yaga and reunites the family. A happy ending later and Lara is tossed back out on her rear, back towards the main plot line.

I’d recommend the Blood Ties DLC over the others, if only for the simple fact that combat is nonexistent and exploration is key. It’s the closest to the straight exploration hook of the original games, and ties into Lara’s past the most. I’m more interested in that than the secret societies and combat-heavy encounters that makes up most of Rise.

Wrapping up a Trilogy
Well, we’re done with the penultimate game in the trilogy, as well as the penultimate mainline game in the series. Of course, I wouldn’t recommend you start with this title, as the 2013 reboot is a much better start point if you wanted to only play the modern games.

There’s a lot of expanding upon ideas spawned from the prior entry, and I feel that most of it hits the mark. What doesn’t is merely echoing complaints I had about the series as a whole. Think back to Underworld and that giant octopus we murdered simply because it was in our way. From what I know, the final game in the trilogy attempts to have a discussion about how Lara has turned into a destructive force around these priceless artifacts. I’m interested in what she might have to say, and I hope you are too.

I hope to see you in the next one!