Tomb Raider (2013) Review: The Gritty Reboot That Made Lara Croft Matter Again
Crystal Dynamics' 2013 reboot reinvents Lara Croft as a scared young survivor on a brutal island. A visceral, cinematic origin story that earns a 9.
This post contains affiliate links. We may earn a commission if you make a purchase, at no extra cost to you.
A Reboot Born From Desperation
🏹 This review is part of the The Tomb Raider Survivor Trilogy – play Lara’s complete origin trilogy in order.
There is a moment, maybe twenty minutes into Tomb Raider, where a young Lara Croft slips, falls, and gets impaled through the side on a jagged spike of rebar. She pulls herself off it. She gasps. She bleeds. And in that single, wince-inducing beat, Crystal Dynamics tells you everything you need to know about their reboot: this is not the wisecracking, gun-akimbo icon of the old games.
This is a scared, hurt, twenty-one-year-old archaeologist who has no idea if she will survive the next hour.
By 2013, the Tomb Raider name had become a punchline. The franchise was creatively exhausted, leaning on camp and nostalgia. So Crystal Dynamics did the only honest thing left: they tore it down and started over. They asked a simple question — who was Lara Croft before she became the legend? — and built an entire game around the answer.
The result is one of the great reinventions in gaming. A confident, visceral, deeply cinematic survival story that made Lara Croft matter again.
Shipwrecked on Yamatai
The setup is lean and effective. Lara is part of an expedition aboard the Endurance, hunting for the lost kingdom of Yamatai somewhere in the Dragon’s Triangle. A storm tears the ship apart. Lara washes ashore on a hostile island, separated from her crew, alone, and immediately in danger.
What follows is a relentless escalation of bad situations.
The island is not empty. It is home to the Solarii, a cult of shipwreck survivors who have been stranded for years and now worship the island’s dark mythology. They are violent, desperate, and they consider every new castaway either a recruit or a sacrifice.
Lara has to find her friends, understand the island’s supernatural secret, and — above all — stay alive.
The brilliance of the early hours is how powerless you feel. You start with nothing. You scavenge a bow from a corpse. You light torches to see. You huddle by fires. The island feels enormous, hostile, and utterly indifferent to whether you live or die. For a stretch, Tomb Raider is closer to a survival horror game than an action blockbuster, and it is all the better for it.
Ad
Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition (opens in a new tab)
The remastered version with sharper visuals and all DLC. The best way to start Lara's survivor saga today.
From Victim to Survivor
The emotional spine of the game is Lara’s transformation, and it is the thing the reboot gets most right — and, paradoxically, most wrong.
When you make your first kill — a desperate, point-blank struggle against a Solarii who is trying to strangle you — Lara breaks down. She is horrified. She trembles. The game forces you to sit in the weight of taking a life. It is genuinely affecting, and for that one moment, the survival fantasy feels real and earned.
The performances sell it completely. Camilla Luddington’s voice work as Lara is superb — raw, frightened, and increasingly determined. You believe this young woman is terrified, and you believe her slow hardening into someone who can do what survival demands.
Watching Lara go from clutching her wounds in a cave to confidently scaling cliffs and clearing camps is a genuinely satisfying arc. The skill tree mirrors it neatly: every upgrade — better hunting, brutal stealth takedowns, salvaging more from kills — feels like Lara becoming more capable, not just the player unlocking a perk.
It is a coming-of-age story told through gameplay, and when it works, it is special.
The Ludonarrative Whiplash
Here is the honest problem, and it is the single biggest reason this is a 9 and not a 10.
That tearful, traumatic first kill? It is one of the most powerful moments in the game. And roughly one hour later, Lara is sliding down ziplines, mowing down waves of armed cultists with a machine gun, blowing up buildings, and racking up a body count that would make a Hollywood action hero blush.
The gulf between “I can’t believe I just killed a man” and “I am now a one-woman army” is jarring. The narrative wants Lara to be a vulnerable survivor; the gameplay wants her to be a power fantasy. The two are constantly at war, and the game never fully reconciles them.
This is the famous ludonarrative dissonance that critics latched onto at launch, and it is a fair hit. The story keeps telling you Lara is fragile and out of her depth while you, the player, are gleefully clearing rooms with headshots. It does not break the game — the moment-to-moment action is too good for that — but it does undercut the very thing the reboot was built to sell.
It is a tonal whiplash that the sequels would handle a little more gracefully.
Combat That Actually Feels Great
Whatever the story’s tonal problems, the act of playing Tomb Raider is consistently excellent.
The bow is the star. It is satisfying, tactile, and flexible — you can take enemies down silently from the shadows, or pin them to walls with a charged shot. Stealth is genuinely viable, and picking apart a camp of Solarii one quiet arrow at a time is some of the best the game offers.
When stealth breaks down — and it always does — the gunplay is punchy and responsive. The cover system is light-touch, encouraging you to keep moving rather than turtle. Weapons upgrade meaningfully as you scavenge parts, turning Lara’s salvaged pistol and shotgun into proper tools by the late game.
It is not a deep combat system, but it is a tight one. Every encounter feels kinetic and readable, and the difficulty is pitched just high enough that survival feels like an achievement without becoming a chore.
Traversal and Spectacle
The other half of the gameplay is movement, and it is gorgeous.
Lara climbs, jumps, swings, and slides through environments that are constantly collapsing, burning, or sliding into the sea around her. The traversal is tight and intuitive — the rope-arrow and climbing-axe upgrades open up the island in a Metroidvania-lite way, letting you revisit old areas for hidden caches.
But the real showstopper is the set-piece spectacle. Crystal Dynamics clearly studied the Uncharted playbook and ran with it. Towers crumble as Lara scrambles up them. A radio tower buckles and falls while she clings on. A raging river hurls her through a gauntlet of debris.
These scripted sequences are jaw-dropping, cinematic, and superbly paced. Yes, they are essentially interactive movies, and yes, they punish you with instant-death failures if you mistime a button. But the spectacle is so well-staged that it is hard to complain. This is one of the best-looking and best-feeling action-adventures of its generation.
Ad
PlayStation 5 Console (opens in a new tab)
Runs the backward-compatible Definitive Edition flawlessly, with fast load times and rock-solid frame pacing.
Where Are the Tombs?
For a game called Tomb Raider, the actual tomb-raiding is conspicuously thin.
There are optional tombs scattered across Yamatai, and they are the closest the game gets to the puzzle-box DNA of the classic series. But they are short — usually a single physics puzzle solved in a couple of minutes — and, crucially, entirely optional. You can finish the entire campaign having ignored almost all of them.
It is the reboot’s strangest self-own. The team built a thrilling survival-action game and then bolted the franchise’s defining feature on as a skippable side activity. For longtime fans, it stings: the thing the name promises is the thing the game cares about least.
The sequels, Rise of the Tomb Raider especially, would course-correct hard on this front, making the tombs bigger, smarter, and far more central. But here, in the reboot, the “raiding” is more of an afterthought than a pillar.
Audio, Atmosphere, and Presentation
The island itself is the unsung hero. Yamatai is a genuinely atmospheric place — perpetually storm-lashed, fog-choked, and littered with the rusting wrecks of every ship and plane that ever crashed here.
The sound design carries enormous weight. Wind howls. Metal groans. Distant screams echo through the ruins. When you are creeping through a Solarii camp in the dark, the audio does as much work as the visuals to keep you tense.
The score, by Jason Graves, is restrained and percussive, leaning on found-sound instruments built from scrap metal and wood — fitting for an island where everything is salvaged. It rarely soars, but it always serves the mood.
On modern hardware, the Definitive Edition holds up remarkably well. It is sharp, runs smoothly, and the remodelled Lara still looks great over a decade later.
👨 The Dad Angle — A Perfect Pick-Up-And-Play Saga Opener
Let me be clear up front: this is an M-rated game, and it earns it. The violence is intense, the gore is real, and several survival sequences are genuinely upsetting. This is not a game your kids should be watching over your shoulder. It is a headphones-on, after-bedtime experience.
But for dads short on time, Tomb Raider (2013) is one of the most respectful action games out there. The 12-to-15-hour campaign is tightly paced and never overstays its welcome — there is no 100-hour open-world slog here, no busywork checklist that demands a second job. You can clear it across a couple of weeks of those precious post-bedtime hours and feel like you experienced a complete, satisfying story.
The checkpointing is generous, the autosave is reliable, and the difficulty is forgiving enough that you can dip in for thirty minutes, clear an encounter, and step away when the monitor lights up. That matters when your gaming time is measured in stolen fragments.
As the first chapter of the Survivor Trilogy, it is also the natural entry point. Start here, watch Lara grow, and you have a three-game saga to work through one short, sharp adventure at a time. There are far worse ways to spend a quiet evening.
Pros
- A confident, visceral reinvention that made Lara Croft matter again
- Excellent bow-led combat and viable, satisfying stealth
- Tight, intuitive traversal and jaw-dropping set-piece spectacle
- Camilla Luddington's performance sells Lara's transformation
- Tightly paced 12-15 hour campaign that respects your time
Cons
- Severe ludonarrative whiplash: traumatised victim to one-woman army within an hour
- Optional tombs are sparse, short, and undercut the 'Tomb Raider' name
- Combat depth is shallow; set-pieces lean on instant-death failures
Final Verdict
Tomb Raider (2013) is a thrilling reinvention that dragged a stale franchise back to relevance. By recasting Lara Croft as a young, scared survivor fighting to stay alive on a hostile island, Crystal Dynamics built a tense, cinematic, and genuinely affecting origin story.
It is held back from perfection by the tonal whiplash between its fragile heroine and her absurd body count, and by tombs so sparse they feel like an afterthought in a game named after them. But the moment-to-moment thrill of survival, combat, and spectacle is undeniable.
A brilliant start to the Survivor Trilogy, and an easy recommendation.
Final Rating: 9/10 — The Reboot That Mattered
FAQ
Is Tomb Raider (2013) connected to the older games?
Which version should I buy today?
How long is the game?
Is it actually about raiding tombs?
Is it suitable for kids to watch?
Disclaimer: This review and its visuals were created with the help of AI. Some links may be affiliate links – we may earn a commission if you make a purchase, at no extra cost to you.
You might also like
Rise of the Tomb Raider Review: The Peak of the Survivor Trilogy
An honest 9/10. Rise of the Tomb Raider is the best-playing entry in the Survivor Trilogy — cinematic survival action with the tombs finally back. Gorgeous, generous, and supremely satisfying to play, held back only by a forgettable cult villain and some survival busywork.
Shadow of the Tomb Raider Review: The Most Beautiful Tomb of All
An honest 8/10. Shadow of the Tomb Raider is the most beautiful and most tomb-heavy chapter of the Survivor trilogy. The puzzles are the best in the series and Paititi is stunning, but a wobbly guilt arc and dialled-back combat keep it from topping Rise.
Star Fox (Switch 2) Review: The Comeback Dads Wanted
Star Fox on Switch 2 keeps the on-rails gameplay that made Lylat Wars timeless and dresses it in gorgeous visuals and a thrilling score. New cutscenes and mission briefings recontextualize the branching routes in a way I didn't expect and genuinely loved. Falco's cynicism occasionally misfires and the enemy chatter is more subdued, but the team banter still sings. If you want Star Fox to come back for real, this is a 9/10 you have no excuse to skip.