As anticipation grows for the next interaction in the series starring Lara Croft, the IP continues to colonize the mobile world with a new free to play game that tries to combine some of the most popular trends in the gaming market. We are referring to the colorful Tomb Raider Reloadedthe latest effort of the team Emerald City Games, which has long been involved in products aimed at smartphones and tablets. While awaiting the debut of the app on the main digital stores, the software house has allowed us to preview the same version of the adventure that can be played by everyone on February 14, 2023: we are finally ready to tell you about it.
Roguelite archaeology
Tomb Raider Reloaded is the third mobile game dedicated to the beautiful archaeologist released in recent years and, as you can easily imagine, offers a completely different structure compared to the interesting Lara Croft GO and Lara Croft Relic Run, a sort of reskin of the well-known endless runner which some time ago monopolized the portable market.
The game in question is in fact a top down shooter characterized by a simple control system and by typical roguelite mechanics. Each of the nine currently available internships is made up of a large number of rooms (ranging from a minimum of 25 to a maximum of 50) which only partially contain procedurally generated elements: the goal is to go through all the rooms and overcome the proposed challenges, accumulating a series of upgrades whose validity is exclusively relative to the current game and which will therefore be removed upon death or completion of the stage.
What we found surprising is how easy Tomb Raider Reloader can be played, as the developers opted for a control system which refers in some respects to the well-known Vampire Survivors: the protagonist attacks autonomously opponents when it is stationaryleaving the user with the sole task of managing its movement through a virtual stick.
The Emerald City Games title can therefore be tackled without problems even on the move, since any action can be performed with the use of a single finger. After all, the movements of the protagonist are the most important aspects of the gameplay, as they are essential to be able to dodge incoming attacks or to solve all those rooms that don’t revolve around combat. In some situations it is necessary to juggle traps and other dangers that advance in the direction of the young archaeologist, who finds herself having to run as quickly as possible towards the exit of the arena. At other times, however, they are proposed little puzzles based on the movement of objects or on the pressure of platforms which, unfortunately, are so simple as to be not very stimulating. Net of the lack of depth in the gameplay, the experience is fun enough to make Tomb Raider Reloaded a great game good pastime to entertain yourself in downtime or to play a quick game before going to sleep (runs can be interrupted and resumed at any time).
Despite being a product designed for a wider audience, there is no shortage of references to the classics of the seriesgiven that the animations during the transition from one room to another take up the legendary movements of the protagonist, not to mention the possibility of meeting the blameless butlerready to provide us with a small power-up in exchange for watching an advertisement (system that also allows access to a free resurrection and a piece of equipment per day).
Nods to old Tomb Raiders can also be found among enemies, as one of the main bosses is a gigantic T-Rexbut there isn’t much else to find for those who are historical fans of the series, with the bestiary made up of fantasy creatures that often and willingly have little to do with Lara Croft, at least as regards the main episodes.
Loot box and progression
Tomb Raider Reloaded is still a free to play and this can be seen by analyzing everything that goes beyond the actual game moments. We defined the title roguelite precisely because of the presence of a equipment screenwhose elements have an incisive effect on the vital and offensive parameters of the protagonist and represent the only real way to be able to face the highest level challenges.
Although there are nine stages in the game, already between the third and fourth you meet the classic ‘wall’ that prevents you from going any further and that requires hours upon hours of empowering the adventuress to enable her to overcome those perils. In our case, we played the “vanilla” version of the title and we were not provided with any kind of advantage: this allowed us to evaluate some elements related to progression more carefully. Unless you want to squander hundreds or thousands of euros on loot boxes, with the hope of immediately obtaining epic or legendary equipment, you will have to settle for the rare drops that can be obtained after replaying levels already unlocked and completing limited-time challenges or activities. From this point of view, Tomb Raider Reloaded is not a particularly generous product and, unlike similar productions, greater dedication is needed to expand the protagonist’s arsenal. For example, the development team has decided not to introduce a pity in the purchase of standard loot boxes: this implies that there is no guaranteed rare item after a certain number of purchases and, with a little bad luck, you could spend thousands of purple gems – the premium currency – and never get a really good item.
Fortunately, however, the possibility exists to fuse items of the same rarity in order to create a more powerful one. With this system, with a little patience you can have more valuable equipment.
This is one of the many elements that the developers have created inspired in a not too veiled way by Survivor.io, the well-known clone of Vampire Survivors (here is our review of Vampire Survivors for smartphones) which still occupies the highest positions in the rankings of most popular products on Google Play Store and App Store. Unfortunately, however, from Survivor.io those automatisms that have made the fortune of many mobile titles have not been inherited and that they would have benefited Tomb Raider Reloaded in no small way.
We are referring to the impossibility of using tickets, the equivalent of energy to start missions, to automatically complete levels already completed in the past and obtain easy rewards. It is a system present in almost all modern free to play for mobile phones and whose absence in the title Emerald City Games is felt. This deficiency emerges above all in the phase of upgrading the pieces of equipment, since there is an important imbalance between the gold coins obtained from missions/challenges and the manualsanother fundamental resource for improving the characteristics of the arsenal which, however, is distributed with a dropper to those who do not resort to in-app purchases.
A graphic style spot on, but not perfect
On the technical front, Tomb Raider Reloaded hits the mark thanks to his stylized graphic style which, combined with the use of brightly colored models and backdrops, is always pleasant to look at and never tiring, not even after a long game session. Net of a pleasant visual aspect, you feel the lack of originality and characterespecially as regards the bestiary: if we do not consider some more inspired bosses, in fact, almost all of the opponents are so generic that they can be compared to any other production with fantasy elements in the absence of Lara Croft on the screen.
The same considerations also apply to the interface, devoid of particular stylistic flashes and affected by some problems that make inventory management difficult. Visual cleaning on the latest generation devices but it has a cost: Tomb Raider Reloaded does not have any type of option to modify the graphic detail (therefore it runs at the best of its possibilities) and this has repercussions on the battery consumption.
