The Tomb Raider reboot, released in 2013, was a game I had known a lot about ever since its launch, but had never had the chance of playing. Don’t ask me why: I did play its sequels, found them to be painfully okay, and never bothered thinking about them ever again. But everyone has always told me the first game in the reboot trilogy was, supposedly, the best one. I knew the buzz surrounding its violent content, its focus on Lara’s growth as a character, and the fact it had to compete head-to-head against Uncharted during that generation of consoles. For some odd reason, here we are, in November 2025, and Aspyr just decided to shadow drop said game onto the Switch and the Switch 2. What an odd decision, but one I’m somewhat pleased with.

It’s not because I was looking forward to finally playing Tomb Raider on a portable (I could have done this with the ROG Ally, for instance), but it showcases that, indeed, publishers and developers will start re-releasing PS4 and Xbox One-era games for the Switch 2, a console that finally allows people to play these games at an equivalent quality on-the-go. I was honestly expecting for Ubisoft to be the first one to unearth a ton of titles from ten-ish years ago and port them onto the Switch 2, but sure, Tomb Raider can work as well. Aspyr is now the company that owns the IP, and they actually did a good job on the porting process. The resolution is decent (with the exception of some cutscenes), the framerate is excellent, no bugs, fast loading times, the usual.

But as a game? Well, I have my qualms with it. I played through the whole campaign (not a long one, to be fair), doing my best to judge it as if I had been transported back to 2013, but to be honest, that did little to mitigate my issues with this Tomb Raider reboot. It’s a perfectly fine action-adventure game with visuals that weren’t bad for the time, a pretty good performance by Lara Croft’s voice actress, decent controls, and even an actually fun (if not simplistic) combat/shooting system. But it’s also one hell of a far cry from the formula that made Tomb Raider the iconic franchise it is to this day, and also a game with a pretty bad story and tone.

I think that the biggest issue I had with Tomb Raider is the fact I did not care at all about Lara and her “character development”. Even for 2013 standards, there were games with vastly better stories being released in tandem with it. Crystal Dynamics decided to base the entirety of Lara’s growth as a person on her getting hurt and attacked by everything and everyone around her. A few minutes into the game, she was already being impaled by debris. She’d then get her leg stuck on a bear trap, get attacked by angry wolves, and even get shot over and over again. If the game was trying to make me sympathize with her, or make me feel like she was developing survivor and explorer skills by facing the hurdles in this videogame equivalent to a snuff movie, then it failed miserably.

Let me give you a big example as to why I thought Tomb Raider‘s tone was, at the very least, incosistent. There’s this now-(in)famous scene that revolves around Lara freaking out after shooting and killing a goon who was trying to assault her. Sure, a potentially interesting way to flesh her out as a character, a human being. Sadly, not even two minutes later, I’d be given more ammo for my pistol, and Lara would proceed to kill everyone in sight with ease, without remorse. She basically went from innocent explorer to murder machine with a lust for blood in an instant. That was the moment I legit stopped caring about Tomb Raider as a story-driven experience; I just kept on playing it as a dumb (but fun) shooter without caring about the people that were part of the plot.

There’s also the issue regarding the sheer amount of AAA clichés crammed into it, but that is not Tomb Raider‘s fault per se. Quick-time events, white paint to denote climbable surfaces, cover-based shooting, a brown color pallete, this was the status quo of that generation of gaming. It feels dated and cliché nowadays, but it was a standard for the Xbox 360 generation of gaming. In this case, Tomb Raider gets a pass. Aspyr wasn’t aiming to remake the reboot for a new generation of consoles; it merely aimed at porting it to the Switch 2 at an acceptable degree. And so they did.

As a port for the Switch 2, I have nothing to complain about Tomb Raider. It gets the job done with honors, runs well on the system, looks decent enough, and all that jazz. All my issues with it revolve around its lack of originality and really bad character development. It is a game all about the origins and development of Lara Croft as a toughened explorer, but man, I didn’t care about her at all after a while. The game’s tone is so all over the place it almost feels silly. Then again, if you simply don’t want to care about Tomb Raider‘s schizophrenic tone, there’s still fun to be had, as this is still a pretty decent, albeit far from spectacular, third-person shooter.

Graphics: 7.5 Runs at a smooth 60 frames per second, but let’s face it: this is a game from the Xbox 360 era. It would have been shocking and pathetic if it had been locked to a lower framerate on the Switch 2.	Gameplay: 7.5 Standard AAA action-adventure controls from the time. Shooting is decent, platforming is precise, controls are responsive. There’s not a single ounce of innovation in this gameplay loop, even for its time, but it’s not bad.
Sound: 7.0 Lara Croft’s voice actress delivers a good job, despite the inner monologues being a pain to deal with. Everyone else sounds… amateurish. The music itself is nothing special, but far from terrible.	Fun Factor: 6.5 I think this game’s tone is utterly nonsensical, and I really don’t care about Lara as a character. That being said, it’s a fine game, just one that, in 2025, doesn’t feel very special.
Final Verdict: 7.0

Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition is available now on PS4, Xbox One, PC, Switch and Switch 2. The original version of the Tomb Raider reboot is also available on PS3 and Xbox 360.

Reviewed on Switch 2.

A copy of Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition was provided by the publisher.