Tomb Raider Game of the Year
Intense overall intensityWhat's in it
Realistic third-person combat in which Lara kills human cultist enemies with a bow, salvaged firearms, and melee/stealth takedowns, with visible blood; failure states show graphic on-screen deaths such as impalement.
Human characters use strong profanity during tense and violent moments.
Grim survival premise built around Lara's repeated injury and near-death, the deaths of companions, and a cult that carries out human sacrifice.
Dark tombs, mutilated bodies, and the ritualistic Solarii cult produce frightening, tense sequences, though it is not a dedicated horror game.
One scripted sequence depicts a captor groping and attempting to assault Lara during a struggle she resists and turns lethal via a button-prompt sequence.
Lara hunts animals such as deer and wolves with a bow for food and experience as a survival mechanic.
Who can reach your kid
What it is
This is a cinematic action-adventure that retells the origin of a young Lara Croft, shipwrecked on a remote island and forced to survive while a hostile cult hunts her and her friends. Play is third-person exploration, climbing, and puzzle-solving mixed with heavy combat: Lara shoots, sneaks up on, and melees human enemies with a bow and salvaged guns, and blood is shown. She also hunts wild animals for food and experience. The tone is grim and often violent — she is repeatedly injured, and when the player fails certain sequences she dies in graphic ways such as being impaled. The island is littered with corpses, the villains run a sacrificial death cult, and one early scene shows a captor grabbing and menacing her in what is presented as an attempted assault before she fights him off. Language includes strong profanity. There are no microtransactions or in-app purchases; an online competitive multiplayer mode exists but the store data lists no voice or text chat.
How it's framed
The game frames its violence as desperate self-defense: Lara is an untested survivor pushed to kill in order to stay alive and protect her friends, and the narrative treats her first kills as traumatic rather than triumphant even as the combat later becomes routine. The cult and the island's dangers are presented as villainous threats, and the attempted-assault scene is staged to establish menace and Lara's resilience rather than as titillation.
Details
- Developer
- Crystal Dynamics
- Publisher
- Crystal Dynamics
- Released
- Mar 4, 2013
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