Lara Croft dies. Tomb Raider is born.

The Lara Croft we see in this game is very different to how we might usually perceive her: confident, strong, comfortable with diving into dark caves or putting bullets into enemies. Instead, our main character starts off as anxious, afraid and averse to violence. This game takes us back to the beginning of the metamorphosis from Lara Croft to the Tomb Raider.

Initially the game has cinematic scripted sequences that can be frustrating to sit through with minimal involvement, but it sets the scene very well and allows you to understand that you are about to play a very different game to the one you might have expected. Lara is attacked, stabbed, exposed to the harsh elements and the game focuses on her pain and fear. She shivers, sobs, and throws up as she tries her best to survive her situation, and this makes her more than a character in a game. It makes her human, and our sympathy goes out to her. If you fail, there are graphic and gory sequences of her death, further increasing your incentive to keep her alive.

However, as you play on she becomes stronger, both emotionally and physically, and the game slowly turns into a more familiar adventure that is exhilarating, albeit a little typical. Weapon and skills upgrades are translatable into good advantages in gameplay, and not prohibitively difficult to acquire. Traversing the areas is fast-paced, and finding ‘tombs’ where you can solve puzzles and earn goodies is rewarding and fun. The main downsides to gameplay are the occasional times where you do not have total control of Lara during certain scenes, and feel like you’re just holding the controller while the script plays out. Second, the ‘survival instincts’ mode where interactive objects are highlighted take some of the fun out of the game as you immediately know where to go and can piece together solutions to puzzles without much thought (though it is optional).

The graphics and cinematics of the game are beautiful. There are a multitude of caches, documents and relics scattered around the areas and it’s actually a visual pleasure to look for them. They also help bring out the archaeological side of Lara Croft, which is who she is at heart, even from the beginning of the game. The overall plot of Tomb Raider is also fairly engaging, though the supporting cast are not quite as well-developed as Lara (something the game attempts to fix by having Lara randomly finding letters that reveal their back-stories).

The completion of the story is as anticipated, and not entirely satisfying. However, once it’s over, there are still mini-quests to complete and various bits and bobs to go find, which you will actually still want to do because it’s quite fun! Overall the main strength of this game is the peek into Lara’s early history and the vivid scenes of her development into the Tomb Raider, but it has enough of the good old shooting and puzzle-solving to please the more traditional gamers too.

Tomb Raider 2013 was released on 5 March 2013. It can currently be bought for around £9.99.