Lara herself is loaded with clever animations, each of them appropriately fun to watch such as when she’s scurrying up walls, shooting an enemy, or piercing a snake with a well-aimed spear. It also helps that Lara Croft GO’s striking visual art style is one of its best aspects, successfully bridging unique and colorful visuals to the world of Tomb Raider perfectly. Sure, it’s not a ground breaking formula but it’s executed so confidently that you’ll hardly notice. The titular character can only move one space at a time to reach her goal, all the while avoiding traps and enemies in the process. You’re plopped into what is basically a tile-based puzzle game with a Tomb Raider skin.
And while its touch-screen beginnings are occasionally hard to ignore, the transition to PS4 and Vita are smooth, to say the least. Lara Croft GO starts out as a walk in the park and may even feel limited in scope but, like any great puzzler, the longer I stuck with it, the subtle blips of brilliance eventually won me over.
It’s the second game in Square Enix Montreal’s GO series (although some of its thunder may have been ripped away by another Go game about catching pocket monsters) that have made the jump from smartphones to PlayStation devices, and if I do dare say, feels right at home on consoles. Lara Croft GO is unlike any Tomb Raider game before it, and it’s because of this bold change of pace that it is so very special.
