I put off playing Rise of the Tomb Raider since August of 2018 since I wanted to play at the highest settings and it was worth the wait. Overall this is one of those games I can call an experience. It kind of defines “AAA Game”. The graphics; voice acting; scale; performance; game play; and soundtrack are all great. The game does have some rough edges and I would have liked to see some things done differently but I had a great time overall.
The story takes place shortly after the reboot of 2013 and sees Lara trying to prove the existence of a lost city that has an artifact that can apparently grant immortality. Much like the reboot you find yourself finding base camps; upgrading skills; hunting animals; engaging in combat with a mysterious group named Trinity that is after the same artifact as well as exploring various tombs. The story was interesting and has some good antagonists but some weak support characters. Much lore and backstory can be found by exploring the areas. I would have liked to see more about the main antagonist Konstantin. I also noticed a couple times where the plot didn’t make much sense. Without going into spoilers I found it weird that just by telling someone they had been lied to for years they believed me without any proof at all. Not the brightest move even if they were being told the truth. Also the game had one moment where it could have ended sooner had someone simply shot their weapon instead of talking. It made me feel like Seth Green from Austin Powers asking why they don’t just kill him when captured.
There are various difficulty levels and it goes a route I don’t like. I prefer if increasing the difficulty increases the intelligence of the AI where here what it does is make enemies stronger and removes features such as manual save. Also strangely you can change the difficulty mid game if you choose one of the lower levels you can’t do so if you choose the top two levels and I see no good reason this decision was made. I also didn’t like how certain areas were only accessible if you backtracked after gaining certain equipment since you would have to backtrack to do the exploring but then go all the way back to where the next story mission was. It would have made more sense to give you the equipment when you needed it or have the story take you back to those areas. There are also many QTE’s in the game, which I don’t mind on principle, but instead of telling you which button to press they give a symbol which could mean melee or use., etc. There are a great deal of skills you can upgrade which can aid what kind of play style you want to go as for more stealth, combat or crafting. You can make devices such as molotov cocktails; bombs; booby traps; as well as use various environmental items to dispatch enemies. You can also focus on ways to silence your weapons; perform finishers as well as kills from above or below. There was a feature called survival instincts that apparently acted like the detective mode from the Batman games and would highlight items to find and enemies but I could never get the feature to work. I tried remapping the button to various keys but it never worked. I didn’t plan on using the feature anyway so I didn’t mind much but a bug is a bug. The camera angles while climbing were usually good but sometimes were ate terrible angles were I had little way of knowing what I was jumping to. It didn’t happen often though.
The graphics were stunning as I said. Everything from fire; to the way clothing looked when wet; to little things such as Lara fixing her hair after it got drenched was all nice little things that added up. There were a couple minor glitches. When you are injured blood will appear at the corners of the screen and this stayed on the screen once during a cut scene. Also there was one scene where ceiling lamps were glitching through the floor.
I played Rise of the Tomb Raider on Linux. It never crashed on me. I played version 1.0.4. It took up 24.98GB of disk space. There are 4 AA settings; Vsync; 5 AF settings; 1 AO setting as well as 15 other settings. The game supports 144hz. Alt-Tab didn’t work. There were short bursts where just after loading a saved game my frame rate would be sub 60 FPS but it only lasted a few seconds.
Game Settings: Highest; no AA; 1080P
GPU Usage: 99% except short bursts from 25-75% (only lasted a few secs)
VRAM Used: 2709-6590MB
CPU Usage: 21-52%
RAM Usage: 6.7-12.1GB
Frame Rate: 63-144 FPS
If you have enjoyed other Tomb Raider games or enjoy open world action games in general I recommend Rise of the Tomb Raider. It has something for everyone and does the series justice. I paid $59.99 USD for the game and beat the story and 68% of the game overall in 17 hours and 53 minutes. It was worth the price tag.
My Score: 8.5/10
AMD Ryzen 5 2600X | 16GB DDR4-3000 CL15 | MSI RX 5700 XT 8GB Gaming X | Mesa 19.3.5 | Samsung 850 Evo 250GB | Manjaro 19.0.2 | Mate 1.24 | Kernel 5.5.11-1-MANJARO