Hello and welcome to platinum review, a series where we talk about some amazing games, break down the roadmap to platinum trophy and I share with you my thoughts on whether you should add another platinum trophy to your collection.

Now without further ado, let’s dive right in.

My Thought About Tomb Raider

Tomb Raider is an origin story of Lara Croft and it shows us throughout the game how she transformed from a young and naive college student into the badass and capable survivor and treasure hunter we all know and love.

The game itself is a hard reboot of the story and has no connections to the older games and it launched in early 2013 on PS3, Xbox 360 and PC with the Definitive Edition following the launch of PS4 and Xbox One. It got mostly positive reception for the story, gameplay and visuals, that were pretty decent for the time.

The story kicks in as Lara and her crew decided to sail into the Dragon’s Triangle to look for the lost kingdom of Yamatai. Upon arriving there, a storm hits their ship, Endurance, leaving them stranded on an island. Unfortunately for them they are not the only people there, and they discover very quickly that the people who are stranded there with them, are worshipping Himiko, the sun queen of Yamatai. Lara has to discover the secrets of this place in order to save her friends and escape alive. The narrative is not perfect, but it is pretty good and did a decent job of keeping me engaged throughout the game.

Gameplay loop is pretty standard and consists of three cornerstones – exploration, puzzle solving and combat and to be honest all of them were fun for me. You do have progression systems in place and throughout the game you will see Lara learn new skills and master new weapons to become the true survivor, and the gameplay is pretty good despite a few flaws, like pacing that can slow down to a crawl in the puzzle sections, but I actually had a great time with it and ended up finishing it twice, once on Xbox One and once on PS4, so I did enjoy it overall.

From the technical perspective the game runs smooth on PS4 at 1080p 60fps, no 4k though, not even on PS5, so gameplay footage you are watching was actually upscaled by me to 4K so it would look better on YouTube. That being said I actually didn’t mind the lack of 4K support, as the graphics do look a bit dated by today standards anyway and the game came out originally on PS3, so I can’t really complain. Also, I didn’t encounter any bugs in the single player mode, but oh boy don’t get me started on the multiplayer, but I am getting ahead of myself, we’ll talk about it later, as I actually dedicated an entire section of this article to it.

Roadmap & Trophy List

As for the platinum trophy, there are a lot of things to keep an eye out for, as game has a bunch of missable trophies, and although you can play on any difficulty and the story is relatively short – around 15 to 20 hours for 100% completion, I would recommend to do everything in one playthrough, since there is no incentive to finishing the game more than once.

In preparation for this platinum trophy, I actually ended up making a list, LudiXP style, of things to keep an eye for, which I unfortunately did throw away, so I can’t show you, but the point is, with a bit of planning it wasn’t terrible, but I was nervous not to miss anything all the way through.

Now let’s talk about the missable trophies themselves. There is a trophy for engaging in all optional conversations, and this is actually the most nerve-wracking trophy this game has, because there are 7 points in the game when you can talk with one or more of your companions and conversations are scattered throughout the whole game and are highly missable, if you progress too far and don’t have a backup save you will have to replay the whole game again, pretty much start to finish. I actually wasn’t even sure if I got the first conversation fully so I had no idea if I would unlock the trophy or not, because there is absolutely no tracking for it, but luckily, I did.

Another one is for incapacitating 25 enemies with a dodge counter, which is missable because you can purchase a skill that will insta-kill them and it doesn’t count.

There are two other combat related trophies that are not hard, but you have very limited opportunities to execute them. You will need to shoot a stick of dynamite in the air, which might take a few tries and shoot 10 enemies from zip-lines, which are pretty rare and only appear in story missions, so you will need to pay attention.

Other than that, you will have to find all the 171 collectibles, complete all the challenges, that can technically be considered collectibles as well, just area related, complete all the optional tombs, get kills with certain weapons, which I was focusing on during my playthrough to avoid post-game grind, do some hunting and get some miscellaneous trophies that are mostly easy enough. I would say that the single player part of this journey is fun and although you have to be careful and might need a guide for some of the collectibles, it’s not that bad, since you can fast travel to all the areas after completing the game and none of the collectibles are missable.

If the story was the only part required, I would probably tell that if you have that completionist itch you should go for the platinum trophy, but here comes the part of the article where I explain you why you probably shouldn’t platinum Tomb Raider 2013.

Multiplayer

Ok, seriously, the multiplayer is so bad. Because it was pretty much a tacked-on mode Crystal Dynamics added in the last minute it lacks any depth and suffers a huge number of technical issues that were never resolved because, well no one was playing it anyway, even when the game was new. In 2021 the multiplayer is pretty much dead and has been for a very long time, and you have 15 trophies tied into it.

Most of them can be done with just 2 people or 2 consoles relatively quickly, but there are a couple of issues. For one of the trophies, you have to win a ranked match in every multiplayer mode. Now, in itself it sounds reasonable, but there is a catch. The game crashes all the god damn time! PS4, PS5, doesn’t matter, I had a game crash on every console while playing multiplayer every 30-40 minutes, and if your game crashes in the middle of the match, you have to play it again and the xp you earned doesn’t save either!!!!!! Now picture this, you are having a boosting session with 4 people, because that’s the number of people you need to be able to get into some game modes, and all of you are experiencing game crashes at different times, while also every one of you needs a win in each one of the 4 match types, that takes around 15 minutes by the way. Well you see where I am going this. It took me like 4 hours to get the trophies that should’ve only taken me 2.

And this is not even the worst part, because you need to grind all the way to level 60, which by itself can take up to 12 hours of just trading kills. And again, you get your xp in the end of the match, so if your game crashes, and it will, you lose the progress you made in that match. Now I managed to get it relatively quickly, about 8 hours, because I was boosting it with a friend and I have 2 consoles I played at the same time to be able to get twice the amount of kills, but omg was it the grind. Don’t get me wrong, this is not the grindiest thing I ever did, but damn was it boring.

I spent around 25 hours boosting multiplayer in the original Last of Us, but at least it was fun, here if I didn’t do it with a good friend of mine, that I could just chat about life while playing, there is no way I would’ve finished it.

Conclusions

So, should you platinum Tomb Raider Definitive Edition?

No, you shouldn’t, and the only reason for it is the multiplayer. Honestly if I wasn’t stuck at home during the pandemic while I was playing it, I probably wouldn’t have finished it either.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate this game, because the single player part is pretty decent, but the platinum trophy experience was basically ruined for me by the multiplayer component, and unless seeing a game below 100% on your profile really bothers you, you shouldn’t platinum Tomb Raider.