While you do get XP bonuses for stealth takedowns and you can hide in bushes and up trees, she’s such a potent fighter that I didn’t find any real incentive to avoid combat altogether. It does, however, make Rise of the Tomb Raider’s much-touted stealthy approach rather redundant. It’s a fun, vicious, and slightly ridiculous new ability which adds a great deal of variety to enemy encounters. While its third-person shooting is the least inspired aspect of Rise of the Tomb Raider, Lara can now build nail bombs, smoke bombs, molotov cocktails, and special ammo while on the fly, all of which can turn a mundane shootout into a pile of dead bodies in seconds. As I played through the main storyline, I increasingly found myself hurrying through combat sections just so I could branch off and hunt down my next puzzle fix, buried in the unsettled guts of an icy mountain or under a murky lake in the mouth of a cave. My only real criticism of Rise of the Tomb Raider’s puzzle-solving is that there isn’t more of it. There are a couple by the end I spent a good hour or two on, but the elation I felt upon solving them was huge. Rise of the Tomb Raider’s ‘challenge tombs’, those that speak most strongly to Tomb Raider’s heritage, are its highlight imaginative, environmentally gorgeous, and increasingly tough as you progress through the world. While puzzles have been baked deeper into the main storyline than they were in Lara’s last outing, the most interesting ones are still those that you have to hunt down on the side. A couple left me lingering idiotically around a rope-wrapped stump, clueless as to what to do with it, until that rush of relief when I spotted another in the distance. One saw me blowing up a statue, another had me slowly and delicately equalizing the weight on a platform. Lara’s rope arrows get a lot more use, too, and the puzzles which utilize these span a remarkable range.

The most heart-hammering moments in Rise of The Tomb Raider come from frantic, acrobatic chases as I fumbled for the right button hundreds of feet above ground.

All her tools - which now include a wire spool for latching onto hooks while airborne and arrows Lara can use to climb up vertical surfaces - can be used in quick succession to keep her in the sky for longer. Lara’s means of traversing her world has also been expanded upon.

To talk about these two - and the mysterious organization they associate with - in too much detail would spoil some great twists, but they’re morally grotesque foes, and their clash of wills result in moments of real darkness. Elsewhere, Rise of the Tomb Raider’s supporting cast are less developed, but fortunately they occupy far less screentime than Lara’s juicy antagonists.

Rise of the tomb raider review