Ten years later the fantastic job that Crystal Dynamics' did with its 2013 Tomb Raider reboot has become even more apparent to me. The mature, 18-rated game took the campy, bright and cartoonish Lara Croft of earlier games and, instead, delivered a dark, hyper violent and at times gripping coming of age origin story with a strong female protagonist.
Yes, there's absolutely no doubting that this game, as well as its sequels Rise of the Tomb Raider and Shadow of the Tomb Raider, owed a lot to the excellent Uncharted series of games, but Crystal Dynamics delivered an action adventure platformer with a markedly different tone, protagonist and cast of supporting characters. It was a hit.
Fast forward and that hit Tomb Raider reboot is now $2.99/£2.49 at Steam, and after picking it up myself, I thought I would bring it to the PC Gamer community's attention, as I think it's a great PC gaming experience to get stuck into in the January gaming doldrums. You can check out the full details of the game below.
If you're a big fan of Tomb Raider already, I'd also suggest checking out the series on CDKeys. The Tomb Raider reboot isn't quiet as cheap there, but there are plenty of options to pick up editions of the game (and its sequels) with bonus DLC bundled in for a bit more spend. Many of these extras are cosmetics, but there are a few extra playable tombs to raid, for example. Here's my top pick from what CDKeys offers.
I've also noticed that both sequels, Rise of the Tomb Raider and Shadow of the Tomb Raider, are also heavily discounted right now on Steam. I've played and completed Rise of the Tomb Raider and, while the narrative is maybe not quite as impactful as the first game, it does offer plenty more action and tomb raiding, as well as a few graphical upgrades. Well worth a look if you've got six bucks to spare.
As for how Tomb Raider runs today, on my PC gaming rig, which is powered by an AMD Ryzen 7 5700X, 32GB of DDR4 RAM, and a RTX 3090 Ti, I could turn every single setting up to 'Ultimate' and get an average frame rate of 118.7 fps. So, yeah, I can almost guarantee that this game will run flawlessly on your system. The two sequels run improved versions of the same base engine, so I'm also confident both of those will run great on basically any modern gaming PC, too.
For even more information on this entire trilogy of Tomb Raider games, you can check out PC Gamer's own verdicts in our Tomb Raider review, Rise of the Tomb Raider review, and Shadow of the Tomb Raider review.
