The Tomb Raider reboot trilogy was and still is pretty controversial for a lot of reasons, but I really enjoyed the first two titles. Of the trilogy, Rise of the Tomb Raider was easily my favorite. It’s past re-establishing Lara as a character and just puts her in another gritty adventure to find ancient secrets. It was dumb fun when I first played it back on PS4, and I remember it fondly. So when a Switch 2 port was announced and released, I was excited to revisit it. All the DLC is included here too, and while I already had all of that on my original copy as it was also the 20 Year Celebration version, I was still excited to revisit the title.
Unfortunately, this is a terrible port. I played the original on PS4 Pro so I got a smooth 60 fps, and despite the Switch 2 definitely being able to handle a title like this at 60 or more, it’s locked to 30 at all times. The original version also had a hefty amount of input lag, and when combined with the accelerated aiming this made it incredibly difficult to do pretty much anything. It seems to have been made worse in this version, with almost a full second between when you make an input, and when Lara responds. This lag is present even when using the new Mouse Mode controls, making it basically useless. Using that mode, it sometimes felt like the camera would only start moving when I had already finished moving the mouse where I wanted it to go. There’s a gyroscope function too, which sounds great for aiming, especially since the deadzone on the analogue sticks feels way too big. When I turned it on, however, I was met with absolutely nothing about aiming changing. I left it on for a while thinking it was another glitch, but then I picked up an artifact which brought me to a menu to examine it. This is the only function the gyroscope serves: moving around artifacts in this specific menu. It’s just so incredibly dumb.
This port is also glitchy. I saw a few graphical issues like some lights flickering in cutscenes, but I also had issues where Lara would randomly freeze up in certain climbing or platforming sections, forcing me to wait until the set piece killed her so I could try again. There’s a falling truck in a temple I had to try climbing about 4 times before the game finally decided to work properly. I also ran into an issue early on where the film grain froze in place, giving the whole screen a weird papery look, but that went away on its own after a bit and never came back.
Aside from all that, the game does look pretty good. The visuals are clean and from what I can tell all the visual effects like snow are there and working properly. It’s a bit old at this point and technology has come a long way, but it still looks good. Very late PS3 early PS4 in terms of art style which is certainly not my favorite, but that matches with the gameplay and overall design. I had forgotten how much the original trilogy likes to make you watch Lara die horribly and painfully though, which was unpleasant.
The game itself is great, offering an exciting adventure with some stealth mixed with shootouts, it’s just a shame this port is so bad. Aspyr and Crystal Dynamics should be ashamed they released the game in this state. It’s a bit of a chore to play, and I didn’t enjoy the few hours I spent with this port. Who knows if Aspyr will fix it, but I cannot recommend it to newcomers or veterans alike.
