If your best memories of the Tomb Raider franchise involve traveling the world and having over-the-top adventures as stylish archeologist/action heroine Lara Croft, then the recent Rise of the Tomb Raider ($39.99 at Target) is the game you're looking for. But that excellent AAA console blockbuster only slowly reintroduces the puzzle-solving gameplay of actually raiding tombs. The $2.99 Lara Croft GO is the superior alternative if you prefer Lara's brains over her brawn. This iPad game successfully shrinks the core tenets of the Tomb Raider series down into an elegant and cerebral mobile puzzle game.
Small Wonders of the Ancient World
Instead of using the (somewhat) open-world format of recent Tomb Raider games, Lara Croft GO ($4.99 at Apple.com) is a series of one-off puzzle rooms. Challenges appear as chapters in a book, with titles that give some clue about their themes. Expect to face lots of snakes in "The Maze of Snakes." Hopefully, you'll be braver than the whip-cracking icon who inspired this whole franchise. Aside from collecting and admiring optional treasure fragments, there's little reason to return to puzzles once you complete them. And with only a handful of puzzles in each of the five books, Lara Croft GO breezes by, even with the recent free expansion pack.
Fortunately, the puzzles stress quality over quantity. Tombs in Lara Croft GO are compact, 3D platforming riddles in which players must consider everything around them to proceed. Swiping the screen moves Lara along notches on a grid, but that grid goes along all three axes. You shimmy along ledges, climb to higher ground, and pull levers to descend to hidden pathways—typical Tomb Raider scenarios.
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The game is also somewhat turn-based. Depending on the stage, whenever you move, the world reacts. Sometimes a saw blade switches positions, sometimes a bridge begins to crumble, and sometimes an enemy shuffles toward you. Figuring out a solution usually means figuring out how to time your moves, not just what moves to make. Proper timing lets you sneak up and gun down a reptilian foe instead of walking into its line of sight and being eaten on the spot. The game thankfully gives you plenty of opportunities to master this timing, since many gameplay ideas reappear across multiple levels—perhaps a little too frequently.
Blast From the Past
Lara Croft GO is the spiritual successor to Hitman GO, another mobile game that turned a top-tier Square Enix franchise into a surprisingly sophisticated mobile game. While that game lacked the verticality of Lara Croft GO, it featured many of the same concepts, such as a focus on carefully planned movements. Those ideas were great in Hitman GO and they're even more polished and refined with this added Tomb Raider flavor.
However, Hitman GO also used a really nifty metaphor for its puzzles: Each level was an austere board game about stealthily murdering people. Lara Croft GO keeps the grid layout but ditches the board game hook for more conventional and naturalistic environments and animations. No more game pieces sliding around flat and tiny tennis court facsimiles. As a result, Lara Croft GO feels a little less hip, clever, and special. But both GO games are more interesting than the Hitman GO mobile follow-up Hitman: Sniper ($0.99 at Apple.com) .
Judged on its own merits, Lara Croft GO's presentation is still splendid. The game has a minimalist, polygonal art style with limited but lush colors on the iPad Air 2 ($445.00 at eBay) . It recalls the early geometric look of the original Tomb Raider games on the PlayStation 1. But while those games' relatively abstract visuals were due to technical limitations, in Lara Croft GO it's a pleasing aesthetic choice. And instead of the chunky animation of the past, here Lara's nimble athleticism is fluidly rendered.
Go, Lara, Go
If you've been numbed by the bombast of big console games this holiday season, a clean but lo-fi charm and mellow methodical puzzles make Lara Croft GO a short but sweet palate cleanser. Between the thrills of its recent console outing and the smarts of this mobile spin-off, the Tomb Raider series has never been better or more interesting since it first took the gaming world by storm two decades ago.
Lara Croft GO successfully shrinks down the action-packed globe-trotting of the Tomb Raider series into a cerebral mobile puzzle game.
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