Ten years ago today, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Tomb Raider rebooted itself with the start of the Survivor trilogy. It's the third reboot the series has gone through, and by far the most transformative, but it's difficult to see what its legacy leaves behind ten years on. Survivor was a huge swing, and modernised Tomb Raider in ways that make it perfectly suited to the current era, yet it doesn't hold an especially fond a place in the overall Tomb Raider canon - with ma𝕴ny worried that what comes next will hew too close to what Survivor wrought. On its tenth birthday, may🐲be it deserves a lot more love.
The first Tomb Raider reboot was 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:the huge misfire of Angel of Darkness, even if it 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:was a stylish effort. This was followed by the Legend era, which relied on bigger set pieces and more open spaces, though still retained the puzzles and tomb raiding aspect of the original series. This was a linear progression - though Lara's personality and look was tweaked, the two eras flow into one another chronologically. Survivor, the third reboot, changed all that. It took Lara right back to the start. In the first game, she's not a Tomb Raider at all, and her father is still alive. He dies in the opening exchanges, leaving Lara shipwrecked on an island where she becomes the Tomb Raider, even though she doesn't really raid tombs so much as awkwardly stumble into them to murder people.
After the first game came Rise and Shadow, forming a linear trilogy. Rise is thought of as one of the best Tomb Raider games around, and is third in my personal list. Shadow, conversely, is too aimless and fails to develop Lara at all, even regressing her to a flat and dull everywoman, and is considered one of the worst. We've been waiting a long time for the next one (five years and counting with no real information), and when it arrives, it will attempt to stitch together the Survivor and Legend eras. These are two trilogies with a Lara who is very different in terms of age, personality, and experience, as well as having completely different plots and gameplay experiences. I suspect it will be a continuation of Shadow with some of the Legend era characters added in, but is that the right move?
Tomb Raider 2013 stripped back a lot of what made Tomb Raider into Tomb Raider. It kept Lara on just one island that she gradually unlocked more of, put more emphasis on weapons and crafting, and limited puzzles to optional tombs which unlocked specific trinkets of no real narrative purpose. This continued with Rise and Shadow, with the open worlds becoming larger, the tombs becoming less significant (even if some became bigger set pieces), and by Shadow 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:you weren't really raiding tombs at all, but completing challenges for stat boosts. Tomb raiding a🥂s a colonial concept is𝓡 controversial, but it feels less like the devs are aware of that and more like there have been repeated failures to weave compelling and complex pu𓃲zzles thꦑat stop you in your tracks into a game that works for modern audiences.
It's easy to see why Tomb Raider 2013 modernised itself. Small open zones, tricky puzzles, and short and to the point games were going out of fashion in 2013, replaced by open world adventures that promised hours and hours of fun, even if most of those hours were collecting gear parts to make shotguns or trekking across a huge map and doing nothing interesting. Tomb Raider 2013 was an experiment with this style. Rise was a near-perfection of it mixed with the classic Tomb Raider staples, and Shadow tried to follow it again but felt too aimless.
Tomb Raider 2013 laid a solid groundwork, but it was never all that popular (personally, I don't think the short and difficult Tomb Raiders would work today, but it's easy to decide in your head that if they existed you would have loved them and the devs are morons). Ten years on, that solid groundwork could crumble like sand. Open worlds have only gotten bigger since then, and it's harder to place a character like Lara Croft in a world like that. The latest trend is the numbies go up live-service model, but both these and ballooning open worlds are declining in popularity.
With Tomb Raider building on Tomb Raider 2013 but avoiding the pitfalls of Shadow but still trying to modernise further but linking to the past trilogy, it could be a major mess. Ten years on, we should be thankful Tomb Raider's last experiment worked, and hope the next one can be as successful. Tomb Raider 2013 sensed where Tomb Raider needed to be in 2013. Can the next do the same?