Rise of the Tomb Raider Review: The Peak of the Survivor Trilogy

The Sequel That Remembered Its Own Name

🏹 This review is part of the The Tomb Raider Survivor Trilogy – play Lara’s complete origin trilogy in order.

The 2013 reboot was a brilliant, brutal origin story — but if you came to it as a long-time fan, one thing nagged. For a game called Tomb Raider, there were barely any tombs. Lara spent her time getting impaled, screaming, and learning to shoot men in the face. It was great. It also wasn’t quite Tomb Raider.

Rise of the Tomb Raider fixes that, and then some.

This is the entry where Crystal Dynamics keeps everything the reboot got right — the cinematic survival action, the satisfying bow, the desperate momentum — and finally bolts the actual adventure back on. There are tombs here. Big ones. Optional, rewarding, beautifully built puzzle-boxes that exist for no reason other than the joy of solving them.

That single decision turns a very good survival action game into the best entry of the whole trilogy.

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A World Worth Getting Lost In

The first game trapped you on Yamatai, a storm-lashed island that always felt like a cage. Rise trades that claustrophobia for the wide, frozen expanse of Siberia — and it is gorgeous.

You move between snowbound valleys, hot springs, frozen rivers, and the ruins of a lost city buried under centuries of ice. The lighting alone carries the mood: low Arctic sun cutting through pine forests, the warm glow of a campfire against blue snow, the eerie shafts of light inside a sealed crypt.

What makes the world special is not just how it looks, but how it is structured. Rise uses semi-open hub areas instead of the first game’s tighter corridors. Each hub is dense with secrets, optional camps, hunting opportunities, and — crucially — the entrances to those challenge tombs.

It is the rare design that rewards the curious without ever feeling bloated. You always sense there is one more thing worth finding over the next ridge, and you are usually right.

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The Tombs Are Back — And They’re the Best in the Series

Let me be blunt: the optional challenge tombs are the reason this game exists, and they are the finest in the trilogy.

Each one is a self-contained physics or environmental puzzle, built around a single clever mechanic. One asks you to redirect superheated steam to raise platforms. Another has you manipulating a frozen waterwheel. Another turns an entire ancient ballroom into a weight-and-pulley contraption.

They are bigger here than in the first game and more inventive than in Shadow. And the reward loop is perfect: solve the tomb, claim an ancient manuscript, and unlock a genuinely useful new skill. You are not raiding for a cosmetic checkmark — you are raiding to become more capable.

For a dad with limited gaming hours, this is the sweet spot. A challenge tomb is a complete, satisfying, twenty-minute story with a beginning, a middle, and a payoff. You can clear one, feel like you accomplished something real, and put the controller down. Few games respect your time this well.

What I love most is that the tombs never resort to the cheap tricks the genre usually leans on. There are no obtuse, pixel-hunting brain-teasers and no padding. Each one teaches you a rule, lets you experiment with it, and then asks you to apply it in a slightly cleverer way before the exit. It is the same elegant escalation a great level designer uses, compressed into a single optional room. By the time you reach the climactic city tombs in the back half, you have quietly become fluent in the game’s language of fire, ice, steam, and rope.

There is also something deeply satisfying about how the tombs are seeded into the world. You will be tracking a deer or scaling a cliff and spot a half-buried doorway you have no business ignoring. That pull — the constant, low-grade temptation to detour — is exactly the feeling the series name has always promised and so rarely delivered.

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Crafting, Survival, and the Best Combat of the Three

The moment-to-moment loop is where Rise quietly outclasses its siblings.

Combat keeps the visceral edge of the reboot — the bow remains the star, perfect for silent, methodical takedowns — but adds far more flexibility. You can play a level as a patient predator, picking enemies off from the trees with arrows, or you can go loud with rifles and improvised explosives when stealth falls apart. The game lets you decide, and both approaches feel good.

Underpinning all of it is a deepened crafting and survival system. You hunt animals for hides, scavenge for resources, and craft ammo and upgrades on the fly, even mid-firefight. Lara feels genuinely resourceful, like someone who could actually survive out here.

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Lara Becomes a Confident Adventurer

The 2013 reboot was about a terrified young woman discovering she could survive. Rise is about that survivor becoming an adventurer.

This is the emotional throughline that makes the trilogy work as a set, and Rise is its centre of gravity. The screaming, stumbling castaway is gone. In her place is a driven, capable explorer chasing her late father’s obsession — the search for the secret of immortality hidden in the lost city of Kitezh.

Lara is steadier here. More certain. She climbs without panic, fights without flinching, and reads ancient ruins like a language she finally speaks. Camilla Luddington’s performance carries real weight, selling both the grief that drives Lara and the growing thrill of the chase.

It is, genuinely, one of the better character evolutions in action gaming — and you feel it most in this middle chapter, where she is no longer scared but not yet the cold legend of the classic games.

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Where It Falls Short — The Honest 9

So why a 9 and not the 10 I’d happily slap on the gameplay alone?

Because the story and villain are forgettable. The antagonists are Trinity, a shadowy paramilitary cult chasing the same immortality MacGuffin Lara is. They are competent, well-acted, and utterly generic. Their leader, Konstantin, has flashes of menace but never becomes a character you remember a week later. Compare him to almost any memorable game villain and he evaporates.

The plot itself is a serviceable treasure-hunt scaffold — enough to string the set-pieces together, not enough to land emotionally. When Rise reaches for big dramatic beats, it mostly misses, because you never quite care who wins the race.

The other nag is the survival busywork. The crafting and resource systems are good, but the constant low-level scavenging can tip into chore territory. There is a stretch in the mid-game where you are picking mushrooms and skinning rabbits more than you are raiding tombs, and the momentum sags.

Neither flaw is fatal. But together they are the difference between “the best-playing Tomb Raider” — which it absolutely is — and “a flawless masterpiece,” which it is not.

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👨 The Dad Angle — Why This Is the One to Play

If you only ever play one game from the Survivor Trilogy, make it this one.

Rise is the entry that respects your fractured, post-bedtime schedule the best. The challenge tombs are bite-sized, self-contained victories. The hub structure means you can wander, find something cool, and stop without losing your place. The combat is flexible enough that you can play it tense and loud on a good night, or slow and meditative on a tired one.

It is also, frankly, the most fun to simply move through. Lara’s traversal — the climbing, the rope arrows, the swimming through icy caverns — is so polished that getting from A to B is its own pleasure. After a draining day, there is real comfort in just gliding through that beautiful Siberian wilderness with no one needing anything from you.

On setup: this is a game that rewards a good display and a decent headset. The Siberian vistas earn an HDR screen, and the spatial audio — wind, ice, the click of a tomb mechanism falling into place — adds enormously to the immersion. It is not a system-seller, but it is one of the better-looking games of its generation, and it holds up.

On time investment: budget 12 to 15 hours for the story, or 25 to 30 if you raid everything — which you should. Unlike a sprawling 60-hour epic, this is a complete, satisfying adventure you can realistically finish over a few weeks of evenings.

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FAQ

Is Rise of the Tomb Raider the best of the trilogy?

For most players, yes. It strikes the best balance of exploration, combat, and crafting, and it brings back the big optional puzzle-tombs the 2013 reboot mostly skipped. It is the best-playing entry of the three.

Do I need to play the 2013 reboot first?

It helps but is not required. Rise opens with a brief recap and works as a standalone adventure. Playing the 2013 game first gives Lara’s growth into a confident adventurer more emotional weight.

How long does Rise of the Tomb Raider take to beat?

The main story runs around 12 to 15 hours. If you raid every challenge tomb and clear the optional content, expect closer to 25 to 30 hours of generous, rewarding exploration.

Does it run well on PS5?

Yes. There is no native PS5 patch, but the backward-compatible version runs smoothly and the Siberian wilderness looks excellent on modern displays.

Is it suitable for kids to watch?

No. It is rated M for Mature with intense violence, blood, and strong language. It is best enjoyed as a late-night game after the kids are asleep.