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Tomb Raider's identity crisis has been fascinating to watch. For the last few years, there have been two Lara Crofts at work: the first of them trying to humanise the video game icon one gruesome injury or base camp bunkdown at a time, the other blissfully free of most mortal concerns, twin-pistol blasting an arcadey path through isometric ruins, often with a co-op partner in tow. Both of these Laras, however, are results of a crucial decision made early on in the design process: the big budget reboot and the Guardian of Light series fundamentally agree when they envision Tomb Raider as an action game above almost all else. And now Lara Croft Go is here, in its soothing, semi-cerebral way, to say that there is much more to it than that. Or perhaps much less.
The old Tomb Raiders have always been surprisingly terrible at action, in fact. The Core games offered the occasional bullet-sponge enemy to pop away at - they were more than occasional in Tomb Raider 2 - but these moments always felt like the designers were paying lip-service to the sort of things that people expected from games. The heart wasn't in it, and so Tomb Raider enemies did stupid things. They would run in circles for no reason, or get themselves trapped on odd pieces of geometry. And while you may remember the T-Rex reveal back in the glory days of PlayStation One, how much can you really recall about the fight that followed? Actually, for that matter, was there a fight that followed?
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