Exploring Siberia in Rise of the Tomb Raider gameplay video

Jessica Vazquez, who was playing the game at the station to my left, took one look at me laughing and then another look at my screen with Lara drowning, before silently shaking her head at me in disappointment.

A good chunk of the game’s first hour flashes back two weeks and takes you out of Siberia to a more “standard” Tomb Raider environment (the sun-baked deserts of Syria). At one point in the demo, I was confronted with an enormous grizzly bear that mauled me to pieces when I tried to get around it. The game helpfully informed me that poison might be a way to get around the beast, and so I was sent off to search the snowy forest for mushrooms and other supplies I could use to craft a poison arrow – something that made felling the bear much easier.

And believe you me, there’s a lot more area to explore.

Now Lara is back in a brand new adventure, Rise of the Tomb Raider, arriving later this year on Xbox One. The desktop is stacked high with books, and the wall above it is a tangled maze of newspaper clippings, torn pages from textbooks, and notes scrawled in Lara’s hand.

Developer Crystal Dynamics did a great job reinventing Croft in 2013, but neglected to add any of the tomb raiding after which the series is named. For the most part, they’re optional, like I said. Rise of the Tomb Raider, though, has plenty of temples. The story revolves around Lara’s pursuit of the Trinity, an enduring organization seemingly hellbent on erasing all knowledge of a figure named The Prophet and everyone pursuing said knowledge (even to the point of chasing Lara with a military helicopter through the desert), from all public record. But now, with Lord Croft gone and her appetite for adventure on the rise, Lara feels compelled to finish the family work. “More positively, we really like the implementation of motion blur used in Rise of the Tomb Raider“. And toward the end of the video, I finally managed to sneak up on some bad guys. However, you can also play non-lethally to avoid combat altogether. The entire event moves very quickly, and it’s easy to miscalculate a jump or when to deploy your ice pick and send Lara to her death.

The Xbox One’s extra horsepower also allowed Crystal Dynamics to build areas that are much larger and more in-depth than anything the team was able to do in the first game. I took off my headphones and began to chuckle at the absurdity of it all.

This time round, completing a tomb will not just give you a bunch of scrap, but you will earn abilities or exotic weapon parts. Your Survivor tree is a bit more about self preservation with “Rapid Crafting, ” “Body Trap Specialist, ” “Intuitive” and “Arrow Climber.” There seemed to be 15 brawler skills to master, 17 hunter skills and 17 survivor skills so that should keep you busy. In the three hours I had with the game I barely scratched the surface of what I could do in each area, and spent a lot of time messing around on ziplines and stealthily sneaking around practicing headshots with my bow in addition to completing side missions.

While it’s not the most likely place for the Tomb Raider franchise to go to after Rise, Horton also revealed that his dream franchise crossover would be to combine Lara’s world with Final Fantasy.

“Combat is taking an evolution towards “choice space”. These skills appear to be totally different from what Lara learns in her skill tree.

Also, while we aren’t able to include cut-scene footage in our analysis, it should be noted that these sequences give the appearance of operating at a resolution lower than 1080p – not unlike the Xbox One version of Tomb Raider Definitive Edition. The sheer amount of options available to you, from a deep specialized skill tree to open-ended environments and missions, means that this is not so much Lara’s journey as it is yours.