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.

Rise of tomb raider gameplay