It’s so odd to see that in a game that wants to make Lara Croft a ‘strong female character’ it takes away so many of her strengths and characters from previous games and then slowly beats her down and brutally abuses her every chance it gets. Just to tell a story that brews down to she shot the bad guy. Like why did Lara need to almost be sexually assaulted for this basic story to be told.
You robbed a character of all her power and then throughout a game slowly drip fed her parts of her old power while exploitatively beating her any chance you got just so you could claim you made her a stronger more feminist character than ever.
It’s such a strange thing that this game got praised for making Lara stronger and a better character when it did nothing like that.

Gameplay is cool tho don’t like how the game feels so on rails tho with having an odd explorable game world you can not explore till post game. Also the tombs are shit

Reviewed on Aug 16, 2022


5 Comments


1 year ago

it's genuinely one of the weirdest games I've ever played. Lara in the old games was entirely self-motivated and independently driven, she was already a strong female character! TR 2013 alternatively is one of the nastiest games i've ever played in how it treats Lara.

It also has a huge disconnect in how fun the gameplay can be with how brutal the custcenes can be. It's a tonal disaster even though it's mechanically fine.

1 year ago

Yeah exactly the deaths in the game and the way Lara always fails and hurts herself feel so fetishistically exploitative in away I’ve not seen in any other video game. The game wants to make her strong but also takes a sick pleasure in making her suffer. It rubs me such a wrong way

I also repeatedly get annoyed between the disconnect of gameplay and cutscenes like Lara has several chances to shoot the villain which the gameplay implies she would do without hesitation but Lara in the cutscenes seems to refuse to try and kill him till it’s too late. It just frustrates me so much

1 year ago

i also resent how crystal dynamics just seems to not understand what makes tomb raider fun. sometimes when jumping and exploring i can almost get that early TR joy but then a dumbass combat/uncharted section comes up and it feels like it wants to be every game but tomb raider.

1 year ago

Yeah sometimes it feels like Crystal had never played a tomb raider game and had only seen photos of Lara

1 year ago

i think Rise and Shadow are more enjoyable. They still have the problems of Lara being insufferable and the plot being just flat out stupid, but I remember them more for actual enjoyable, fun stuff rather than putting me off my fucking lunch like TR2013.