The areas of Rise of the Tomb Raider are often wide and encourage exploration, Lara packing the skills and tools to open up the environment. The forests of the taiga, interior cave areas, and some settlements help keep the player from getting snow blindness, making it easier to accept that most of the game will have you climbing icy walls with icepicks, tromping through snowed over woods, and contending with iced over ruins. Despite being set mostly in the snowy mountain range, Rise of the Tomb Raider does escape from its snowy setting on a few occasions without totally breaking away from the idea you’re exploring one interconnected location. Most of the game takes place in the frigid mountains of Siberia in search of the legendary city of Kitezh, although the game has a brief segment near the start where she’s searching the deserts of Syria instead. Lara herself is also given a bit more depth, her competency allowing her focus this time around being on how the previous game’s events have left a lasting impact on her and how it influences this current quest to validate her father’s research. The leader of this particular group of Trinity soldiers is a cold yet pious man named Konstantin, a surprisingly chilling villain who is calm when ruthless but driven by a religious calling towards this particular mission. Lara sets out in search of where she believes it to be, but it appears the Trinity group is alive and well in the modern day, the group trying to not only stop her, but to suppress any further interest in it by any means necessary. Lara’s father had been looking into the possibility of immortality, his research focusing on a medieval prophet who claimed to have found a Divine Source, a concept a group called Trinity aimed to suppress. Set after her formative experience on the island from the previous title, Lara Croft is now a more seasoned explorer and survivalist, her attention now turning to research of her disgraced and deceased father to try and find if there’s any truth to his ridiculed research. However, Rise of the Tomb Raider does come with new settings, a new story, and a refinement of what the previous title did, trimming the fat as it searches for how best to handle this reimagining of Lara Croft’s adventures. Following the successful 2013 reboot of the Tomb Raider series, Rise of the Tomb Raider picks up with the reimagined version of Lara Croft years after in a game that feels a bit more like a continuation of the previous game’s mechanics and concepts rather than an advancement.