Lara Croft And The Temple Of Osiris Preview

When Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light burst onto the scene in 2010, it was a breath of fresh air for a game series that had lost a lot of its lustre at that time. Straying away from the Tomb Raider branding, it was clear that this was an off shoot, a digital-only experiment that took a familiar character and transposed her into a very different style of game to what we were accustomed to.

It wasn’t just that the view point shifted from the third person to an isometric 3D overview of the world, but the gameplay now centred around the co-operative interplay and puzzle solving between Lara and the two millennia old warrior named Totec. Together, they went on an adventure that saw them trying to thwart the evil Mayan god Xolotl.

Yet, even with the critical acclaim and popularity amongst gamers, it soon seemed that this off shoot was to be a dead end. The 2013 reboot of the main Tomb Raider series took hold, receiving excellent reviews and selling millions. Fans who have wanted a Lara Croft sequel looked to be out of luck until recently, when Lara Croft and the Temple of Osiris was announced for PlayStation, Xbox One and PC at E3.

As the game starts off, Lara gets into trouble once more, but this time it’s not entirely her fault. Carter Bell, a hot headed “up & coming” archeologist, as Lara disparagingly puts it, grabs at some archeological trinket or other and manages to get the two of them cursed, trapping them both in an ancient temple somewhere deep in Egypt.

As the Egyptian god Set awakens, preparing to unleash evil and chaos into the world, so too do his sister and Isis and her son Horus. It’s this that leads to the biggest change to the game’s formula, compared to Guardian of Light, wherein there is now up to four player co-operative play.

I was only able to play in a partnership between Lara and Isis, matching human and god together for the familiar mismatch that we saw previously. Naturally, Lara has many of the same abilities as before, with her dual pistols, torch with which to light braziers and a grappling hook that allows her to create tightropes for her buddy to cross and also allow her to scale certain walls. Isis, on the other hand, has the powerful Staff of Osiris that acts as a powerful beam weapon or can encase her in a defensive shield bubble, while allowing her to raise certain platforms in the game for puzzle solving.

It’s these differing abilities which allow for some asymmetrical puzzles, where one player has to do certain things for the other to be able to progress, and this still makes it an absolute joy to play in co-op, trying to figure out what to do in partnership with a friend. If you want to play it solo, then Lara will be able to take Isis’ staff and the puzzles will be modified a little so that you can finish the game on your own, however I didn’t get to see the shift in puzzle design between two players and three or four, and it’s not too clear how flexible other permutations are with co-op play. For example, whether or not you can play as a god-only team or human-only and how abilities are dished out, or if drop-in/drop-out co-op is possible.

What I do know is that the game retains a good mixture between puzzle solving and action. With the number of enemies that came at us and their toughness, knowing how best to use the remotely detonated mines that all characters are able to use is important, just as it was in the first game. Similarly, you’ll all be able to pick up more weapons like an assault rifle, that can spew out a lot more damage than Lara’s pistols or the gods’ staffs, though ammo is limited. What all these modern weapons are doing in an ancient, unexplored temple and how Isis and Horus are so good at handling them are two questions that will probably never be answered, but amusing to ponder.

On top of these, there are amulets that, should you be able to avoid taking damage, will build up a meter that boost your abilities. These are for the whole team, and you can switch between them, but there’s a more competitive twist to grabbing the rings that are tucked away in the game, as these are just for whoever picks them up and provide permanent boosters to things like damage and your health bar.

Pulling the camera out to this top-down viewpoint does lessen the cinematic spectacle that was possible in last year’s Tomb Raider game, but there’s still a lot of depth to it. It’s perhaps the shift up to four players that excludes the PS3 and 360 from the release roster, but the shift to better hardware pays dividends in allowing them to throw a lot more dynamic lighting and other modern effects at the screen.

Over the second half of the level, the huge demon Ammit is often visible in the far off background, with her quite preposterous crocodile’s head, lion’s mane and hippopotamus body, as she is let loose by Set, culminating with her chasing you across a bridge, which breaks up and collapses as you run and jump across the shifting platforms and bizarrely placed spike traps – those kooky Egyptian tomb builders!

Thanks in part to the four year gap since the first game, Lara Croft and the Temple of Osiris has this odd mixture of feeling both familiar and also pleasingly refreshing. While there’s a lot that’s the same or similar to what we saw before, which is easily forgivable given that it’s just the second game, the bump up to four player co-op should be enough to make this one feel nicely distinct and increases the potential for friendly shenanigans exponentially.