Lara Croft GO

While it would be easy to dismiss the GO series as another mobile game cash grab of a recognizable franchise, it’s definitely much more than that. Lara Croft GO is a great fit on the PlayStation 4 (beyond a few rare instances of fighting with the analog stick), especially at the $9.99 prige tag. I am now a proud member of the GO fan club and I’m ready to move on to the Hitman and Deus Ex incarnations. However, I might wait for the latter to come to PlayStation 4 since my time with Lara on my console was so great.

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Lara Croft GO is unlike any Tomb Raider game before it, and it’s because of this bold change of pace that it is so very special. It’s the second game in Square Enix Montreal’s GO series (although some of its thunder may have been ripped away by another Go game about catching pocket monsters) that have made the jump from smartphones to PlayStation devices, and if I do dare say, feels right at home on consoles. Lara Croft GO starts out as a walk in the park and may even feel limited in scope but, like any great puzzler, the longer I stuck with it, the subtle blips of brilliance eventually won me...

Lara Croft GO is clearly the product of a love for what the Tomb Raider series used to mean. Your pistols are more of a tool than a weapon, and you certainly won’t be killing an island’s worth of men. A lovely visual style and a zen-inspiring score provide backdrops to my favorite Croft adventure in some time. I’m now grateful for the delineation between the action-filled Tomb Raider and puzzle-focused Lara Croft games. Even though I enjoyed 2013’s hectic reboot, sometimes you just want to stop and breathe it all in, tomb dust and all.

From the opening menu screen of Lara Croft Go – a wheel of items you cycle through, reminiscent of the early games – to the tropical ruins and mysterious caverns of its five chapters, Lara Croft Go feels like a classic Tomb Raider experience, with its sense of adventure and mystery finely distilled into an endearing, scaled-down format. While it retains the same turn-based style of gameplay as Hitman Go, it knows full well what kind of pacing and approach to action makes a Tomb Raider game what it is, and bends the structure of the puzzles to convey this with an engaging consistency, looking g...

Lara Croft GO nails all of the elements that make for an enticing mobile title: Fun in small chunks, visually appealing, and thought-provoking, Lara Croft GO can provide hours of enjoyment for a small entry fee.

Beyond those gripes, this is wonderful. Slick, beautiful, gently challenging and supremely well designed, it’s a stunning piece of work. Oh, and I need to make sure to remember to mention the music - ambient gorgeousness, which you can hear here. Sometimes I get annoyed with a puzzle, have to walk away for a bit, but when I come back I wonder what I was thinking. Perhaps that sort of approach is more suited to a phone, but this remains a game that plays very well on PC, and looks utterly stunning in its conversion.

Like Hitman GO before it, Lara Croft GO proves to be a brilliant reimagining of a classic franchise. It may not have the tense atmosphere of the newer Tomb Raider games, but that's part of the reason that GO succeeds. It successfully illustrates the versatility of the franchise as a whole, showing that it can work as a soothing puzzle game just as well as an action-packed, nerve-wracking platformer. It's an outside-the-box design that makes it a perfect fit on mobile devices and provides enough substantial challenge for either a dedicated night in or playing on the go.

Following in the sneaky footsteps of Hitman's Agent 47, Lara Croft GO is the next entry in Square Enix's mobile series of spin-offs to make its way to PlayStation 4. However, does the home console version justify the higher price tag?

Lara Croft GO was created for a mobile audience willing to play intermittently. Being ported to consoles, is there enough here to satisfy a stationery audience as well? For those looking for a breezy experience, mission accomplished. For those looking for something more, it's still a decent weekend experience.

Lara Croft GO is more than just an experiment, going way beyond its developer’s vision to distill yet another iconic license into something smaller. Instead, it stands on its own as one of the year’s best games for mobile and tablet, thanks to simple yet intuitive gameplay that strikes a perfect balance between being fun and challenging. Tomb Raider fan or not, Lara Croft GO is a must-have and will hopefully continue to expand in the months to come.

The PS4 version of Lara Croft Go comes packed with the new “Mirror of Spirits” expansion. Developed by indie studio Ko-op, “Mirror of Spirits” is set in the Croft Manor and comes with new mechanics and puzzles. The most interesting hook required me to control Lara and her doppelganger that matches her movement in a mirror world. Controlling two Lara’s gave a little more life to the game’s exhausted puzzle formula. Overall “Mirror of Spirits” was a solid addition that helped flesh out Lara Croft Go’s content.