Rise of the Tomb Raider review: This is Lara’s best adventure yet

The trouble with a successful reboot is that there's only one way to follow it up. Rise of the Tomb Raider is bigger and bolder, its filmic set pieces pummelling you into your sofa with more ferocity than a 1980s cassette tape. Oh yes, you will be entertained and then some.

What comes after Rise of the Tomb Raider is depressingly inevitable: a piling on of features to appease an increasingly demanding audience, with ever more outlandish action sequences that are a desperate attempt to top what came before. A few sequels later and the masses, flaming pitchforks in hand, will be calling for the bloated, directionless mess that is Tomb Raider to be rebooted. The publisher will have no choice but to dutifully oblige.

But I digress. Rise of the Tomb Raider is an excellent game, even a brilliant one in places—it's just gonna be very hard to top it.

Or at least most of it will be very hard to top. If there's one thing that Tomb Raider didn't quite get right, a thing that's sadly repeated here, it's the story—but it's not for lack of trying. If anything, Rise of the Tomb Raider tries a little too hard to correct the narrative flaws of its predecessor, shoving as much heavy handed and often clichéd characterisation into its cut scenes as humanly possible. As you can imagine, this quickly grows tiresome. At the very least, the game's supporting cast is that little bit more interesting this time around, their profiles raised from forgettable archetypes to interesting, if emotionally over-the-top individuals.

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