We got our first look at Crystal Dynamics’ newest Tomb raider title, Rise of the Tomb Raider, which continues the story of Lara Croft following the 2012 reboot of the franchise. The playable demo at the Xbox Booth at this year’s PAX Aus featured Lara, making her way through a small tunnel before emerging into a larger tomb below. As she progressed throughout the tomb, Lara appears to be following in the footsteps of her father, making several comments along the lines of “we’ve finally made it” prior to emerging into newer environments with multiple booby traps and derelict ruins.
Playing on the Xbox One the environments were well-built even if the game was only running at around the 30 FPS mark, the plus side of that at the very least is that there did not appear to be any drop in frame rate, though keep in mind this was just a playable demo. Puzzles were also very heavily featured with Lara making plenty of use of her trusty ice pick to break down unstable walls and jumping onto platforms to activate pully systems. The graphic death scenes also make a return, I personally fell down into a stake pit and watched a pretty brutal scene of a spike impaling Lara’s neck before loading up the previous checkpoint. The game plays fluidly and is very forgiving in its parkour mechanics.
All in all a pretty solid experience and I’m looking forward to playing more of it! Rise of the Tomb Raider releases first on Xbox One on November 15th before being released the PS4 and PC launch.