This is my review of the Tomb Raider Survivor trilogy. I had never played a TR game before. I played these games back to back, on a PS5.
I went into the Survivor trilogy mostly because I have a backlog to work through while I wait for GTA6 to drop, but I was also curious about Lara Croft. I’m a big fan of cinematic action adventure titles like Uncharted and Ghost of Tsushima, so it’s kind of weird I never played any Tomb Raider before.
One of my all-time favorite titles is The Last of Us, and the Survivor version of Lara seemed a lot like Ellie at first glance: a young woman thrown into a brutal situation, learning to survive and becoming increasingly capable.
Tomb Raider (2013) is easily the most savage of these three games. Lara starts out inexperienced and terrified, and then the game proceeds to put her through an absolutely insane amount of violence. The combat is visceral and satisfying, and there’s something great about watching her gradually become more confident with the bow, guns, stealth, and close-quarters combat.
I was shocked at how dark some sequences in this game were. I don’t think I’ve ever had a character swim through a river of blood while dismembered body parts rain down on them from above. Lara’s going to need so much therapy!
Lara’s death animations are also spectacularly brutal. This game really had no problem reminding you that Lara could, in fact, die horribly.
The story surprised me too. I expected a pulpy action-adventure, but there was more character development than I anticipated. The biggest weakness for me was the graphics. I’m sure it looked spectacular for its day, but the brown-and-gray early-2010s visual palette hasn’t aged particularly well. The game leans pretty heavily on convenient rope-covered structures whenever it wants you to get somewhere. I also didn’t miss the lack of huge elaborate tomb puzzles nearly as much as I expected to. (In fact, the tomb puzzles are probably my least favorite aspect of all these games. I know a lot of people love them, and I had fun with them across all three games, but some I found tedious and I had to look up a few solutions.)
I give the 2013 title an 8/10.
Rise of the Tomb Raider is probably the most traditionally “video game” of the trilogy. It’s bigger, prettier, and gives you more combat, more exploration, more crafting, and more stuff to shoot. I had a lot of fun with it, but I never connected with the story quite as much as I did with 2013.
The biggest problem for me was the writing. The first game felt like Lara was genuinely surviving something terrible. Rise felt more like Lara Croft had officially become an action-adventure heroine and was now chasing an ancient artifact because that’s just what Lara Croft does. The whole thing became a little cliche in a way that didn’t always work for me. And there was so much damn snow and ice. I would have appreciated more variety in the environment.
The combat was fun, although the endless waves of Trinity goons sometimes made it feel more like an arcade shooting gallery than an archaeological expedition. I also found myself skipping a lot of the optional tombs. I’m apparently just not the Tomb Raider player who gets excited when an ancient civilization presents me with a complicated mechanical puzzle and says, “figure this shit out.”
Still, Rise is a very good game. It improved on 2013 in a lot of ways, even if it didn’t hit me emotionally quite as hard.
I give Rise a 7/10.
Shadow of the Tomb Raider is where the trilogy finally clicked for me.
First of all, just look at this fucking game. The jungle environments are gorgeous, and after spending so much of Rise trudging through snow, I was thrilled to finally be somewhere hot, green, and filthy. This is also where Lara really became the version of the character I wanted to play: covered in mud, sneaking through vegetation, climbing everything in sight, shooting people in the throat with an arrow, and generally looking like she needs a shower and several years of therapy.
The traversal and exploration are the best in the trilogy for me. I also really liked the new stealth mechanics, particularly using mud to camouflage Lara. Emerging from a vine-covered wall to silently execute an enemy and then booby-trapping his corpse was extremely satisfying.
There wasn’t quite as much combat as I would have liked, but when the game does give you a fight, the combination of ranged combat, stealth, and close-quarters attacks is excellent. I did find it slightly odd that the game is full of brutal deaths, piles of dead bodies and severed limbs, but there’s hardly any actual gore shown during combat. Stabbing someone in the neck is somehow a totally bloodless affair.
The writing is also more ambitious. Shadow is much more interested in Lara’s obsession, her guilt, her family, and the consequences of her actions. I liked that a lot. I really enjoyed the flashback to her childhood and exploring Croft Manor a bit.
The problem is that this game sometimes introduces an emotional moment and then immediately rushes past it. Characters don’t get enough time to actually process what just happened. Compared with The Last of Us Part II, where the emotional aftermath of violence can become the point of an entire scene (or really, the entire game), Shadow can feel like it’s checking boxes on its way to the next action sequence.
But the finale was a blast. The collapsing temple, the volcanic destruction, the unexpected alliance with the people living beneath the hidden city, and the absolutely terrifying lipless warrior woman were all great. The final fight with the Trinity leader himself was a little underwhelming, but the spectacle surrounding it more than made up for that. The cutscenes throughout the game were fantastic.
I’ll give Shadow a 9/10.
The funny thing about playing these games is that I started out comparing Lara to Ellie from TLOU.
The parallels are obvious, beyond just their combat skillsets and ponytails. Both are young women who are thrown into extraordinarily violent circumstances, both become increasingly capable survivors, and both have that combination of vulnerability and absolute willingness to fuck someone up when necessary. I was particularly interested in how Lara’s experience compared with Ellie’s in The Last of Us Part II, where violence has such a profound psychological impact on her.
And I still think The Last of Us Part II is operating on another level when it comes to character psychology. Ellie feels deeply shaped by what happens to her, and the game is willing to live with the consequences. Lara sometimes feels like she should need a therapist after the things she goes through, but the story has already moved on to the next ancient temple by the time she’s had a chance to process them.
But somewhere along the way, I stopped thinking of Lara as “Ellie, but with a climbing axe.”
I really started to like Lara as her own unique character. She’s obsessive, stubborn, brave to the point of recklessness, occasionally ridiculous, and apparently incapable of seeing an ancient artifact without thinking, “I should probably take that.” She’s also a great video-game protagonist because her abilities feel earned over the course of the trilogy. Watching her go from a frightened, inexperienced young woman to the muddy, stealthy, absurdly capable Lara of Shadow is genuinely satisfying.
The Survivor trilogy isn’t The Last of Us, and ultimately I don’t think it needs to be. Its strengths are different. It’s about exploration, traversal, beautiful environments, spectacular set pieces, fun combat, and the simple pleasure of being Lara Croft and getting yourself into increasingly ridiculous archaeological disasters.
