Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition - A Storm In A Port (Review)
- James Stephanie Sterling
- 3 minutes ago
- 6 min read
Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition
Released: November 18th, 2025
Developer: Crystal Dynamics, Eidos-Montréal, Feral Interactive, Nixxes Software
Publisher: Square Enix
Systems: PC, PS4/5, Switch, Switch 2 (reviewed), Xbox One/X/S
Revisiting Tomb Raider is like looking at a photo of someone taken moments before they died.
Back in 2013, the game industry was only just setting its foot on the path to damnation - Square Enix had dared to release Final Fantasy: All the Bravest a few months prior, and other companies were carefully testing their audience’s boundaries for monetization opportunities. Developers like Crystal Dynamics could still make games that weren’t entirely pruned away to make room for the choking weeds that their corporate gardeners were planting.
Of course, Crystal Dynamics would be shred to ribbons and eventually sold off after Square Enix became increasingly disappointed with good sales figures. When Tomb Raider came out, its publisher was embarking on a long quest to debase itself in the name of mad profiteering and desperate tech fad bandwagons. A year later, the alt-right would sink its fangs into gaming, monetization would dominate the medium, and the road to hell was littered with bad intentions.
Tomb Raider 2013 was also the poster child for games journalism having no idea what ludonarrative dissonance was but confidently using the term anyway. For the record, Tomb Raider 2013 was never an example of ludonarrative dissonance - quickly getting over the horror of your first kill in a violent situation full of killing is not only consistent between storyline and gameplay, it’s been a common action plot occurrence for as long as bad guys have gotten themselves indiscriminately mowed down.
Still, I miss when the discourse du jour was as banal as that, back before nerdzis tried to make everything about them.
Anyway, another big point about this game is that Lara Croft’s designers spent a silly amount of time on individually animated strands of hair, something I wasn’t able to appreciate while I worked my way through Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition. Aspyr’s marketed this game on what it calls an “obsessive” attention to detail, but there’s a distinct lack of it on the Switch 2. You could almost say there’s some dissonance going on.
Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition doesn’t look hideous, but I’m nonetheless surprised by how subpar it looks on a system that’s capable of much better. I can somewhat understand there being compromises for the original Switch, but not for hardware that can handle Cyberpunk 2077 with far fewer issues. It looks more like it’s running on a PC with the graphics set to medium… in 2013.
Aside from an overall pedestrian quality, there are some grim texture situations going on. Environmental details inelegantly ooze into view as you approach them, with certain objects looking better or worse depending on how you angle the camera. Taking screenshots for this review felt unsporting at times, since it only exposed all the low-res effects and excessively blurry motions.
Fine details like mesh fencing or foliage have a flirtatious relationship with corporeality. One area required me to shoot things through a hole in a cage, which wasn’t too obvious at first since most of the cage was completely invisible - I had to keep aiming my bow to make the majority of it appear. Without aiming, all I got was a frame and some floating hole openings.
I’m not exactly a graphics girl. I like it when games look gorgeous, but I think art direction is much more important and I can forgive outdated visuals most of the time. However, when you’re selling a game on the basis of it being reworked to look great on modern hardware, it’s fair to be disappointed when it looks far from great. Remasters of 7th generation games shouldn’t be making a brand new console look incapable of running them, and I’d honestly be pissed off if I were in Nintendo’s place.
The game itself is at least still good. It boasts a tight focus and atmosphere that I felt was diminished as Tomb Raider’s “Survivor” trilogy progressed. It nicely balances a linear narrative and loads of side activities, combining story sequences with open areas designed for exploration that can be revisited at will. Many of the extra challenges are woven into Lara’s journey in such a way that they feel convenient rather than derailing.
With so many activities and collectibles clearly signposted, character progress is a doddle. It takes hardly any time out of the main campaign to gather what’s needed to fully beef up Lara’s weapons as soon as their upgrades are available. I had all the skills and upgrades long before I’d finished all the side corn, and I didn’t mind it, but some may find it a bit trivializing.
Tomb Raider’s large scale setpieces are still really good. It’s always a thrilling time when Lara has to escape a collapsing structure or survive a chase sequence - they’re terrifically presented moments, ones that became a hallmark of the trilogy for a reason.
Replaying Tomb Raider confirms to me that Crystal Dynamics could have been a standout survival horror studio, as some truly ghastly imagery crops up during Lara’s island traumathon. The pit full of bloody water and piles of flesh is especially memorable, and some of the sneakier sequences have an effective sense of desperation to them. God though, I must once more marvel at how much this game loves kicking the everloving shit out of its protagonist - she brutally lands on a conga line of hard surfaces, her pain adoringly brought to life. Her many potential deaths make the PSX trilogy’s violence look like a birthday party.
What really makes me shiver is just how often Lara will sustain a super deep wound and swiftly end up wallowing in filthy, fetid water. 90% of Lara must consist of pus by the end of the story.
Tomb Raider dutifully ticks its 2010s post-Uncharted checkbox, featuring big climbing sequences and combat heavily inspired by Naughty Dog. You can tell because enemies eat your bullets like they’re Scarface unless you headshot them all. Naturally, you’ve got your hunting, your obligatory Survival Vision(™), and your standard issue dose of stealth. All the hits.
I must say, I remain a sucker for how Lara puts her hand out to touch walls whenever she’s near them - little flourishes like those are what impress me so much more than fancy hair physics. Less impressive is Tomb Raider’s obnoxious shakycam effect, another product of the time that occurs during gameplay as well as cutscenes. I’m very glad that games don’t really do the handheld camera thing these days, because it ain’t pleasant.
The Definitive Edition is light on options, and its limited use of the Switch’s gyroscope is disappointing. Motion controls are used for examining relics and wobbling the menu around whenever you’re at campfires, but they’re not implemented for anything useful. Tomb Raider rewards the accurate shooting of small moving targets, so using gyro for finely tuned aiming should be a no-brainer. It would at least give this port something to justify itself, but it’s not featured.
A lack of worthwhile gyroscope input makes handheld mode an unappealing prospect because Joy-con sticks on their own are pure shit for pretty much any standard shooter. The Pro Controller is better, but considering the Switch 2 version of that particular device is really quite bad, I would struggle to recommend it without caveats. Honestly though, any Switch game with aiming in it ought to have gyro options as standard.
Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition does a basic job of presenting the 2013 classic on Nintendo’s latest hardware, but expecting anything more than that will lead to disappointment. In fact, expecting exactly that may still be a letdown if you think it’ll look anywhere near as nice as it should. This is a game being pushed on how wonderful it looks, but it just doesn’t look good on the Switch 2 at all.
6/10
