It is, if nothing else, a hell of a title. Rise of the Tomb Raider: it's got that hint of pulp-magazine shlock, of the lurid, post-colonial adventures of the class of fictional explorers and action-archeologists to whom Lara Croft owes so much.
It works on other levels, too. Her last game, 2012's Tomb Raider, reset the clock and cast Lara as a vulnerable ingenue learning the strength and resourcefulness - and ruthlessness - that she would need to become a hero. It was a jarring gearshift for a character whose previous incarnation was a remote, ice-cool badass, and her personal struggle clashed with the violence of the gameplay. But, as a narrative device on its own terms, it worked. And now that title promises the pay-off: the rise and rise of New Lara as the finished article, the Tomb Raider, the swan-diving, rock-climbing, gun-toting woman of our dreams.
It only half-delivers. Even as Rise of the Tomb Raider's lightweight but sturdy framework for character development propels Lara to a capability her former self would have envied - survivalist, commando, craftswoman, fluent in ancient Mongolian and able to lethally overpower warriors twice her size - its storyline arrests her development. Developer Crystal Dynamics serves a preposterous yarn about a lost civilisation in the Siberian wilderness with a sombre straight face, saddling our heroine with obsessive daddy issues to work through. It's a game with a bad case of second-act syndrome. The Tomb Raider's rise might have to wait until after therapy.
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