This summer, in anticipation for the new Tomb Raider game, I decided to play through Rise of the Tomb Raider. Since then, I have completed the game 4 times on the three hardest difficulties, 100%’d the game, and gotten all 143 achievements. After 130 hours of adventuring, I have successfully squeezed every ounce of unique gameplay out of Rise of the Tomb Raider. And I’m not disappointed. Rise of the Tomb Raider is a fantastic adventure game and shooter, and it does an incredible job letting casual players enjoy the experience while also allowing for hardcores to ram their heads into the walls in frustration.

Story – 2.5/5
The weakest part of Rise of the Tomb Raider is its campaign. It is a mixed bag. Having played through the campaign four times (because the achievement hunting willed it to be so), there are numerous irritating plot holes. Lara’s allies here are overall more compelling than in this game’s predecessor (y’know, when they ineptly crammed the nine npcs’ backstories down our throats and then made saving them the primary objective of the game? Yeah. Doesn’t suck as much as that did), but they act erratically and often have nonsensical dialogue. The entire plot is a macguffin hunt, which ends up getting sidetracked by another macguffin hunt. After bad stuff happens that was caused by the secondary macguffin hunt (the eradication of an entire village), it is then revealed that a close contact of Lara’s knew the ENTIRE TIME where the primary macguffin was, making the secondary macguffin hunt (and all lives lost because of it) completely pointless. If that was irritating to read, I can assure you that’s because it was just as irritating to play through.

Gameplay and Progression – 4.5/5
While its story may be lackluster, hot damn is the gameplay fun. Parkour is a blast here, and optional challenge tombs make fantastic use of the player’s increasing move repertoire. Combat makes you feel like a badass, and the ability to build your moveset more towards stealth, run-and-gun, or a hybrid as you level up is intuitive and fun. The XP you get is directly correlated to how much you’re adventuring, so if you are having issue with progressing in a certain area, you can always backtrack and explore to level up.

Style and Graphics – 5/5
This game is very well optimized, and the third person exploration is greatly enhanced by the fact that everything is just so darned interesting. The outdoors are a gorgeous landscape with ecosystems Lara actually has to interact with to survive. Lara winces and shivers. She clutches her wounds. Her raspy, pained voice contributes to the atmosphere, which sounds different depending on the environment you’re in. When you find a relic, Lara becomes excited and makes suppositions about the object’s relevance and what led to its abandonment. Crystal Dynamics aced the aesthetics on this one.

Baba Yaga DLC – 4/5
Good albeit predictable plot. Adds psychedelic twists onto the game as well as a final boss battle that is probably the hardest fight in the entire campaign. Ashly Burch (Chloe, Tiny Tina, Ms. Pauling) plays Nadia, and the puzzles involved here rival those of pretty much any challenge tomb you can find. A lot of awesome.

Additional Gameplay Modes
Out of all my 130 hours, my campaign playtime accounts for probably 25ish hours in the grand scheme of things. The additional modes in this game are numerous, and are honestly the thing that makes this game worth buying.

Score Attack – 5/5
The crown jewel of gameplay in Rise of the Tomb Raider is timed mode. You have to pick up collectibles, shoot paper lanterns and kill enemies all in a row to keep your combo multiplier up and hopefully beat the threshold for that gold score. Taking damage, waiting too long or dying will reset your combo and potentially ruin minutes worth of precision parkour, stealth and puzzle solving. If that isn’t enough, the game allows you to mod your experience through the use of in-game cards. Beneficial cards divide your final score while detrimental cards make it bigger. It leads to some great cost/benefit analysis as the more difficult you make it the higher your score. With 27 levels to struggle through, this is an addicting game mode, and one that I am surprised other games don’t copy left and right.

Endurance and Endurance Co-op – 4/5
Endurance loads you with a warmth and a food meter that both go down fairly quickly for different reasons. Out at night? Warmth drops rapidly. Running around all over the place? Food starts to plummet. In the meantime, Lara has to avoid enemy soldiers and locate tombs to plunder artifacts. The achievements are buggy. Sometimes the game decides to throw a mix of five bears and lynxes at you at the exact same time. On rare occasions your hunger and warmth meters will break and start to plummet for no reason. But all of these bugs are completely overshadowed by the sheer novelty and fluidity of this game mode. Co-op brings Nadia back as your partner and lets team members revive one another for when you or your friend inevitably get mauled by a cougar. This game mode is a blast, especially when you mod it with beneficial cards to nerf some of the overly difficult parts – because the score really doesn’t matter.

Blood Ties and Lara’s Nightmare – 2/5
Advertised as an exploration of the Croft mansion, I anticipated this portion of the DLC to be the one I liked most. It turned out to be kind of a bummer. I hoped for a reprise of the original Tomb Raider 2 (1996) mansion, which was rife with obstacle challenges, mysteries and secrets. Where the environment in Tomb Raider 2’s mansion felt understated and mysterious, Blood Ties just lays all its cards down on the table and walks you through a set path you will have a hard time deviating from. The color palettes are dim, environments uninteresting, and the family letters and artifacts Lara finds feel forced and dull. There is nothing you have to hunt for. No secrets. Lara’s Nightmare adds back the Baba Yaga influences to make it more psychedelic, but is marred by technical screwups. Overall, this portion was a humongous letdown.

Cold Darkness - 5/5
Another short and hidden gem, Cold Darkness is a subversive narrative that relies on some interesting mechanics. Slowly building your arsenal and rescuing prisoners, you have to shut off three big machines that are releasing a toxic agent into the air turning all males into zombies. Nadia and Lara get to talk a lot in the downtime as the former guides Lara through the process of deactivating these machines. The tone works, the voice actresses do a tremendous job, and this is probably my second favorite mode in the entire game.

Rise of the Tomb Raider packs a lot of different experiences into a single package. Crystal Dynamics’ reboot of the franchise continues to improve, and Shadow of the Tomb Raider has all of the tools it needs to be fantastic. The issues of Tomb Raider have largely been resolved, and the alternate game modes really push the limits of what this game can do. This is the closest thing to Uncharted for Steam, and has a myriad of fantastically diverse game modes that will keep you hooked well past the 50 hour mark.