Rise of the Tomb Raider: 20 Year Celebration Review for PS4

This is Gaming Cypher’s PS4 review, done by Hemal Patel, of Rise of the Tomb Raider: 20 Year Celebration by Crystal Dynamics and Square Enix.

It has been almost a year wait for Playstation 4 gamers to play the highly anticipated sequel in rebooted life of Lara Croft. I always liked the previous Tomb Raider, finding ancient secrets, catacombs and treasures, peeking inside the history and solving puzzles to advance through the level.

Rise of the Tomb Raider on the other end, provides you a lot of extras, a lot of beautiful and scenic snow lands of Soviet Installation, beautiful green lands of Geothermal Valley, and for the last part the ancient city of Kitezh situated beneath ice. This is personally the best Tomb Raider I have played because of the gameplay and the beautiful valleys.

Looking at the gameplay, it provides a lot of different play styles we can see. This game throws you in the wild lands all alone, survival using Lara’s instinct and the skills you can accumulate. The game restricts you from using certain areas without you get required skills and tools. There are three basic types of skill set available in game that are: Brawling, Hunter and Scavenging skills. There are a lot of skills not shown in skill tree but can be accessible by finding the hidden tombs and cisterns. The wild animals like wolf, snow lions and bears gives an extra touch of wilderness to the game, facing them, using the survival instincts and available tools, is just so exciting and challenging. You can also go back and forth in between the different locations as accessing the camp fires and enhancing your weapons and tools.

Once you acquire the required tools and skills you can feel the difference of how far Lara has gone to. Enhancing the weapon and tools will allow you to easily clear through the gang of Trinity members. My personal best weapon to use was Death Breath bow, helps you in playing stealthy as well as explosively. The grenade arrows are best when you encounter whole gang of enemies, even the immortal army of the Prophet feels nothing when you can destroy them using the armor piercing arrow headshot. The game has couple of places where you get input lag or glitches but the overall satisfying exploration in game makes you forget those.

The story mode is more kind of an intense and immersive experience, the way how Lara cannot overcome the fact that her father killed himself and Trinity involved in with a lot of different matters. Lara finding atlas and the immortal army of Prophet was my personal favorite moment.

The music in game has been a different experience altogether, because it always changed from silent and peaceful to dark depending on the situation. Once you hear the bell sounds you will know that you are in for challenge tomb, this always had me excited finding those tombs and solving the puzzle to get inside those tombs is extremely satisfying.

The game is graphically convincing with all the beautiful valleys, jungles and waterfalls. The snow covered mountains are mesmerizing. The graphics in the game are extremely detailed and makes the game looks so beautiful with difference in color as you go through the Soviet Installation to Geothermal Valley.

Conclusion:

In the end, I personally think this is the best of the Tomb Raider games I played with a lot to offer, including gameplay, details. This reboot has set really good platform for the upcoming games in the series. Even after we finish the story, we can come back to Find hidden tombs, relics and challenges. Expedition mode and other DLC’s provides considerable amount of additional play time to the game itself. Rise of the Tomb Raider: 20 Year Celebration gives you a seriously tough challenge to play on the hard mode, and more exciting. I really think if we can just keep the glitches and input lags aside, I would give this game 9 out of 10 ratings.

Watch the Rise of the Tomb Raider: 20 Year Celebration gameplay video:

Rise of the Tomb Raider: 20 Year Celebration is now available in all major retail stores in North America at a suggested retail price of MSRP $59.99. As a special launch week bonus, Square Enix is awarding everyone who logs in and plays Rise of the Tomb Raider on any available platform with 100,000 in-game credits, with which players can purchase Expedition Cards to be used in a variety of replay modes.

Hemal Patel

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A gamer turned into a game developer. A huge batman fan and follower of Arkham Series, generally I like to play mostly Action and RPG genre of Games. Into the Abyss!!! PSN: AbyssRyder

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