All media requires a certain level of abandonment of your sense of disbelief. These are fictional stories featuring fictional characters, and their adventures often strain the rules of reality. Some strain it a little, and some games, like Rise of the Tomb Raider, incredibly strain belief. It's the continuing adventures of Lara Croft, daughter of an English lord who somehow turns into a one-woman killing machine in her search for a relic to grant immortality. I'm sure I'm not the first to make this joke, but it's odd how she's searching for the gift of immortality when she is constantly surviving things that would kill the average person. Falls from great heights, bullet wounds, freezing rivers, and bears are just some of the exciting things that Lara gets hit with and walks off. This series often gets compared to the Uncharted franchise, but typically with less fanfare. I think the reason here is that there's less a sense of adventure than those games. Uncharted has a team of adventurers globetrotting across the world to discover the next piece to the puzzle. Rise of the Tomb Raider spends almost its entire time in a frozen Siberian Soviet base. I know many people criticized the previous games for having little tomb raiding, and while they tried to insert it more here, it's mostly optional side quests. This isn't to say that I completely disliked this game. I actually find Lara surprisingly relatable, given that she has the powers of a Terminator. At least the other characters acknowledge this fact, and stand aside while she goes off to massacre hundreds of soldiers. I think the relic and the lore around it was surprisingly interesting, as opposed to the villain and evil conspiracy which really wasn't. It's been probably a decade since I played the first of the new Tomb Raider games, and while neither wowed me, I think someday I'll get around to playing the third as well.