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Rise of the tomb raider pc best buy12/27/2022 ![]() Endurance digs through to the game that I think Rise of the Tomb Raider really wants to be. Lara's in no danger from the environment, unless you count spike traps as natural hazards: she's just doing her A-Team thing with no fear of exposure or starvation.Ĭonversely, in the Endurance DLC she's close to death the whole damn time, and as a result it becomes a truer game of exploration and risk-taking, rather than an odyssey of implausible action movie tropes. Resources such as wood, cloth and oil must be gathered from the land, and animals large and small must be hunted for hide and feathers, but it all only serves one purpose: crafting weapon and item upgrades. ![]() The survival aspect of the main campaign is pretty thin, even if the sandboxy approach to it manges to stay on the right side of mechanical. £6.99 on top of the base game's £36 is a pretty hefty price to pay for the Endurance mode add-on, but having spent some time with it I'm convinced that it's the best way to play Rise of the Tomb Raider. I wanted to spend more time with the game at the heart of all this rather than find out what happens, so I nosed at the Expedition side-missions and the DLC (already available in bulk, as the temporarily exclusive Xbone version had this stuff a while back). It'll be a cold day in hell before Tomb Raider embraces comedy, but a little more self-awareness would go a long way, as would a more open spirit of joy: Lara is, after all, doing this crazy stuff by choice.Īs well as that, the slew of setpiece bear battles, over-long cutscenes and chain-reaction avalanches were killing any sense that this Siberian wilderness I was in was a real place. It's one thing to fail to comment on the inherent absurdity of what Lara goes through, and another still to actively force a blandly grim mood over the top of all that squirrel-bothering, avalanche-surfing, ancient ruin-devastating and climbing around pirate ships embedded into an underground cliff-face. I have no strong feelings about the actual writing one way or another, but the tone of its presentation is the issue. I want Rise Of The Tomb Raider's great outdoors challenge, partly because it's a beautiful place to be, partly because the game does a grand job of making a complex control set feel fluid and rewarding, partly because its protagonist comes across as capable and hardy in a way a beefy man with a gun rarely does, but I don't want its plot. Fortunately, the Endurance Mode DLC turned out to be game I wanted. It's nice to not have yet another BrawnMan in the middle of my screen, sure, but for me it's the idea of vaguely puzzley, vaguely sandboxy adventures in a not-too-fantastical wilderness which appeals.Įnthused by Adam's review, I picked up the PC version, but it wasn't long before I was hissing through my teeth at the bad balance of impossible escapes from death, relentlessly dour and earnest tone, mechanically-delivered dialogue and preposterous animal-massacre-based-crafting (because, once again, Lara had gone on an incredibly dangerous adventure without packing anything more than a glowstick and the first option you get if you type 'bow and arrow' into Amazon then sort by Price: Low To High). I wanted to play Rise of the Tomb Raider more than I realised I did.
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