Lara Croft Go Review

Lara Croft is the latest Square Enix character to get the turn based treatment on PlayStation 4. The GO series has had three incarnations since 2014, all of which were built for mobile devices. This was my first experience playing this style of game so I had very few expectations going into it.

Lara Croft Go’s simplistic yet breathtaking art style is the most immediate way to praise it. Split into several chapters, with each maze given its own distinct feel and colour scheme. 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.

Lara Croft GO turned out to be a short but action packed adventure that fit nicely onto the PS4.The easiest way to sum up this title is to imagine a third-person exploration title miniaturized into a isometric board game format. You control your Lara Croft piece and you move her one space at a time. After your turn, any enemies and active traps will make their move. The pace is quite lax here as you have all the time in the world to plan out your next move or search the screen for hidden treasure.

At first it might seem counter intuitive to limit an action game star to slower experience but the accompanying traps, environments, and relic hunting make Lara Croft GO feel like a legitimate tomb raiding experience. AdvertisementThe story is threadbare in this game and honestly, it’s the perfect fit.

You’re basically on a number of quests to uncover ancient treasure. There are a small number of interactions that you’ll have with a mysterious mirror world or a slithering (and persistent) antagonist that give some character to the game. It also helps that Lara is very expressive and her movement is nicely animated.Speaking of character models, the game’s art design has a nice balance of retro blockiness fleshed out with modern sheen. The aesthetics in Lara Croft GO evoke a feeling of the early Tomb Raider games while taking place on a glossy game board. While the enemy types are limited, your mostly-reptilian foes are menacing enough to keep you on guard.The most impressive aspect of the visuals however are the numerous environments found throughout the adventure. Forests, caves, and some more supernatural areas are all lush with detail and are impressively put together. The multiple backgrounds blend beautifully with the game board.

And on certain levels you’re treated to a silhouetted foreground that creates a stunning landscape. There’s a lot of ‘depth’ found in the locales of this title and also within the gameplay itself.Gameplay in the GO series is basically puzzle solving meets turn based movement. Numerous elements are slowly added to this formula until you get a healthy mix of levers, buttons, traps, and enemies. The way these aspects are integrated are actually quite ingenious: at one point, I needed to use a giant lizard as a shield from arrows flying out of the wall. At another point, I had to throw a spear over a pit to kill a snake holding down a pressure sensitive button.

The interplay of objects is what makes the game feel fresh and not overburdened. Well, that’s the case for most of the adventure.The PlayStation 4 port contains (at no cost) the two pieces of DLC that were released for mobile devices. The first, The Shard of Life, is a noticeable step up in difficulty from the first five chapters.

The first two-thirds of the game had some head-scratchers that were fun to solve. However, the puzzles after that are much more devious. While looking for this ‘shard’ you’ll encounter monsters that can’t die and multi-level action with movable pillars.

Some of these challenges require you to be thinking up to 8 steps ahead which is jarring compared to the gradual build of the first campaign. AdvertisementIt’s basically like a hidden object game squeezed within the main campaign. It felt like half the urns were obvious whereas half where well hidden. There were only a number of them that took me a good hard look to locate. When you replay levels, the amount of secrets waiting needing to be found is shown making the hunt even more user friendly.

It’s a nice distraction that worked well with the exploratory nature of the title. Also, the unlockable costumes served as good motivation to collect everything. Does Classic Lara interest anyone?

She even comes with her blocky sunglasses!While it would be easy to dismiss the GO series as another mobile game cash grab of a recognizable franchise, it’s definitely much more than that. Lara Croft GO is a great fit on the PlayStation 4 (beyond a few rare instances of fighting with the analog stick), especially at the $9.99 prige tag. I am now a proud member of the GO fan club and I’m ready to move on to the Hitman and Deus Ex incarnations. However, I might wait for the latter to come to PlayStation 4 since my time with Lara on my console was so great.

Earlier this year PlayStation gamers were lucky enough to get a port of Square Enix Montreal’s fantastic Hitman GO on PS4 and PS Vita, which was the surprisingly-addictive puzzle game that was responsible for kicking off an entire new series. However, the game that followed that one up is Lara Croft GO, which is a game that many consider to be the current high point in the GO series. Now that very game is also making the jump to PlayStation platforms, and it makes the transition in an unsurprisingly fantastic fashion.Lara Croft GO similarly takes the core of the Tomb Raider series it originates from and boils it down to a simple concept of traversing a board in a turn-based manner while solving puzzles and strategically taking down enemies. While it appears simple on the surface, the game has a surprising amount of depth when it comes to all the different components and how they each have their own rule sets. There’s much more going on in these levels than in Hitman GO, as things are taken to vertical terrain as Lara will be climbing the environment while locating switches and carefully traversing crumbling platforms. In true Tomb Raider fashion, there are also plenty of collectible to look out for that can be acquired with a simple tap of their spot on the screen once you’ve spotted them.Combat itself works in the same way as before, as you’ll be able to attack enemies from the back or the sides, but you’ll die if you hit them from the front.

Some enemies will remain stationary, whereas others will move around the board and even chase you if you’re spotted. This game gives more opportunities to overcome your enemies by using the environment to your advantage, with boulders and sawblades proving to be a danger to both you and your enemies.

The game is also able to scale these challenges very well over its numerous levels, keeping things fresh by incorporating new enemies, weapons and puzzle types as things go along. It also doesn’t hurt that the game is gorgeous from both a visual and audio standpoint, especially for what was built as a mobile game.

The music that accompanies your adventures is very soothing and mellow, providing an atmosphere that’s certainly less bombastic than what is currently offered in the main series. The interesting and vibrant art style is also a pleasure on the eyes, again being simple but offering enough variety and wonder to make you want to get deeper into the game for more than just the sake of completion. Lara Croft GO continues to impress after its jump from mobile to PlayStationThe PlayStation versions of these games allow the game’s audio and visuals to come to life even more than before, with both the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita versions looking and sounding terrific. The real value in picking up the PlayStation versions (you get both with cross-buy and cross-save is also supported) is the sheer amount of levels that are being offered here. The initial game received free updates that added more levels to the adventure, but this version has over 100 levels thanks to the new Mirror of Spirits expansion (available first for PlayStation gamers).

Speaking of which, the Mirror of Spirits expansion is a great addition to this game’s impressive amount of levels, incorporating new mirror mechanics mixed with a change of pace in visuals and audio that are very unique compared to what has come before.This is all done without a traditional narrative, which is one area where fans of the main series may be let down a little. The focus is entirely on gameplay here, though that doesn’t mean that there isn’t some semblance of an overall conflict going throughout the journey. Lara is of course on the hunt for big treasure and must go through increasingly-deadly ruins in order to gain her prize, but there is an evil presence looming over the adventure that does add a bit of suspense to the mix.

The storytelling is done more so in a suggested and visual manor here, and it works well. The game never lays on its puzzle mechanics too thickly, either. It has been designed in a way that each level can be completed in a few minutes at most, with many of them being far quicker. However, the game is just challenging enough where trial and error gameplay remains the key to overcoming the hazards the game throws at you. It’s very forgiving with its checkpoint system and respawn times are quick, which keeps the overall aggravation factor of repeated deaths to a minimum.

There are always new and unforeseen traps waiting for poor Lara to fall victim to, and failing over and over until you come up with the solution to get past them is all part of the game’s addictive loop.It also offers some decent replay value that caters to hardcore Tomb Raider fans, as well. The aforementioned hidden treasures that are scattered about the levels will eventually unlock new outfits for Lara, which are taken from previous games in the series and even other Square Enix properties. It’s great to be able throw on outfits from earlier games like the catsuit or the wetsuit, and actually being able to find all of the hidden treasures to do so is a rewarding challenge of its own. Kholat syakhl 1959. The VerdictThe reverence for the series’ past in both gameplay and the attention to the smaller details is what ultimately makes Lara Croft GO a love letter to the 20-year-old Tomb Raider series. It offers even more of what the original game did last year and with the added benefits of more powerful hardware, making this a no-brainer for PlayStation gamers.- This article was updated on:January 17th, 2017.

Available On: PS4, PS Vita, PC, iOS, Android. Published By: Square Enix.

Developed By: Square Enix Montreal. Genre: Puzzle. US Release Date: December 3rd, 2016. Reviewed On: PS4, PS Vita.

Quote: 'The reverence for the series’ past in both gameplay and the attention to the smaller details is what ultimately makes Lara Croft GO a love letter to the 20-year-old Tomb Raider series. It offers even more of what the original game did last year and with the added benefits of more powerful hardware, making this a no-brainer for PlayStation gamers.'