Publisher: Square Enix/Crystal Dynamics
Genre: Action/Adventure
Summary: After her expedition to a mysterious storm-wreathed Japanese isle is shipwrecked, Lara Croft must survive a murderous cult and find a way to escape.
Gameplay: Getting around in the game requires having Lara jump, climb, and shoot her way through obstacles. Sometimes it requires good timing and sometimes it requires some thinking (especially in tombs.)
Lara gradually gains access to more options over the game, and this includes weapons. Combat includes a good variety of styles with stealth or explosions or otherwise cleverly using the environment often possible.
Weapons can be improved through salvage Lara finds and Lara also has a choice of abilities that she levels up in over the game, although these are somewhat awkwardly tiered.
Style: The game looks great. The island has a nice variety of environments, from moody forests to snowy ruins to rusted shipwrecks, but what really impresses is the weather and lighting effects. Lone lamps sputter in the dark, blazing embers fly away in the wind, and water spatters against the other side of the computer screen (I especially like the last touch. It lends to the cinematic aspect of the game and also fits the story of a stranded documentary crew--as if this is the film they never got to make.)
It's also very gory. Many of the settings abound with corpses and blood. It got so in may places I found it went over the top into silliness. A light touch would have kept it at horrific.
Story: Lara's story is very engaging and fun to play, but there are a few problems in the telling. The first part is that it's missing its first part. The game begins with the shipwreck and we get flashbacks later to introduce us to the crew, but I found myself wishing there was a prologue to learn a bit more about everybody, especially Lara. To emphasize her growth into a survivor and explorer, it would help to understand more about what she was like before.
There's also Lara's mutant healing ability. Not including whatever might happen during in-game combat, throughout the story Lara suffers impalement (which goes without treatment through appalling conditions and then said treatment isn't exactly great), horrible foot injury, and getting knocked unconscious at least three times, in addition to various other cuts and scrapes. I was half expecting some mystical explanation for how she was still moving.
I realize it's just the action hero cliche of being able to shake everything off, but it clashes with the game's story when Lara is inexperienced and reacts realistically to being wounded at the start. Likewise, when Lara first kills someone and comments on it, it feels rather bizarre that the armies of men she has to slaughter later don't merit any response.
The plot moves easily through cinematic set-pieces, but I found myself pondering what a more open-world version of the game would be like that allowed for a bit more wandering (Lara does has some freedom of movement within some areas, but that just makes it feel all the more awkward when she goes off to explore a tomb when she's supposed to be rescuing a pilot or whatever.)
All that said, the story and characters are fun, even if nothing is too unpredictable. I especially like the light parallels between the main villain and Lara.
Conclusion: "Tomb Raider" is a beautiful and entertaining game. Despite some oddities in the plot, it tells an engaging story about the growth of the adventurer Lara Croft.