This is an excellent finish to the rebooted Tomb Raider trilogy, that will give fans of the first two a satisfying conclusion. And for anyone who felt there wasn't enough old-school actual tomb raiding this has much more in the way of that, with a lot of challenge tombs that are meatier in content this time around. All of them have great design, nicely judged puzzles, and are longer to finish than the relatively bite-sized ones found in the previous games.

The developers haven't really changed things too much just doubled down on that aspect, and then given Lara some enhancements in combat. Doing stealth attacks is required on the harder difficulty levels, as Lara is fairly vulnerable and enemies can be quite punishing. The option is there to go all guns blazing (bar one sequence where stealth is enforced) but ammo is relatively limited, and you can be quickly cut down if you're careless.

They've finally found a really good balance between the Tomb Raider of old, and what it is now. Platforming, puzzling, slick combat, and several impressive setpieces round off IMO what it should be in this day and age. Throughout the game, all of these elements are evenly spread out, and each has been given a high level of polish.

On the gameplay front, this is great and has plenty of content. It took me 40 hours, and I still had several tombs unfound at the end. I don't understand why some reviews are saying it's too short - they must have played it on one of the easier difficulty levels, where there's a lot more handholding by the game.

You can remove all of the guidance, and automated actions such as having a longer time to grab ledges, etc, and increase the challenge in combat. This, in turn, gives more incentive to find the optional quests and get their XP rewards/bonus items to give Lara an advantage. And so, y'know you get your money's worth. If someone sticks it on easy and then whinges that there's no challenge, well, I don't have any sympathy. That's not on the developers - that's on them for being a bit rubbish.

If there is one element that I wouldn't be too enthusiastic about, then it's the story - or, rather, the storytelling. The plot is...okay, the level of writing is...iffy. The dialogue isn't badly written (it's average, and gets the job done), and I'm not one to go into all that "white savior" load of testicles that some SJW reviews have had a go at the game for, but having people in Peru speaking perfect English and using modern terms doesn't work for me.

It makes it more accessible, yet I would rather have authenticity (have Lara speak their language and translate the dialogue) than this simplistic, jarring alternative. Considering that some of the people Lara encounters live in a hidden city, and have never met modern civilization, it's weird when they use words like "wow", and weirder still that some of the dialogue isn't in English and gets translated into subtitles. Is there a hidden tribe of people where some speak perfect English, or what?

Other than that this was a great game, and gets a big thumbs up!