Lara Croft and the Temple of Osiris Review

Much like Guardian of Light before it, Temple of Osiris is like an easy-to-play puzzle-heavy isometric action game. It’s cleanly put together, multiplayer focused, and is clearly designed with a wide-audience in mind. The gameplay itself is pretty decent, as you might expect, but it does very little new and fails to provide anything like a compelling story.

The game features more or less constant combat but it doesn’t feel like a huge grind. This is partly because the groups of enemies are small, change often and also because they are broken up with frequent puzzles and novel boss fights. The combat is a blast fest, Lara runs around using a variety of guns and other range-based weapons to quickly murder enemies, occasionally swapping out her guns for a staff which is used in a variety of ways to solve puzzles.

There's some cool bosses, like this one

There’s not a great deal of challenge to the game, particularly if you go running around after all the gems and treasures which help you to get better weapons and items. It seems like this is partly the idea, that it’s a game anyone can jump into with three friends and roll through. Waypoints are so close together that you barely notice it when you die. Even boss fights are subdivided, so if you get to the final stage of a boss and snuff it, not only don’t you have to do it all over again but most likely the game will pop you right back into the point moments before you died but with a full bar of health.

The game is heavily focused on simplistic cooperative multiplayer. The puzzles are of the Indiana Jones kind of formula which you find in games like the Lego series - step on this, push that, roll that ball into that, shoot that and, boom! The door at the back just opened. There’s not much head scratching going on, it’s more that you need to just take two seconds to step back and go… “right OK, that goes in there, that goes there, and then that’ll open. All right, let’s do that.” These mechanics are often later integrated into boss fights such that you have to solve little puzzles, pushing boulders around and so on, while a boss is raining down on you.

It provides a good level of almost arcade-style fun, and doesn’t require you to think too much to work out where you’re going next, to the extent that giant statues in the main hub area point you in the right direction if you’re not sure. It does it all quite well too, it’s well-oiled, nicely put together, with a decent graphical style and all that. But it’s really nothing more, there’s nothing new, there’s nothing particularly interesting. It’s just the same kind of simple arcade action fun we’ve been having for decades, but with a new coat of paint.

Enemies are well varied, but in the end it's simplistic blasting over and over

The voice acting in the game and the story is, in my opinion, hideously weak. But given the vocal fidelity of the people involved I’m willing to put that down to the script rather than the actors themselves. I never got around to playing the much acclaimed 2013 reboot but it was very highly praised for the storyline and character depth. You certainly won’t find any prizewinning writing around here. The plotline is a roughly cobbled together rehash of old Egyptian stuff which we’ve heard time and time again. I was more motivated to progress in this game by achievement popups than the surrounding events, and cut scenes were soon demoted to instantly-skipped status.

Every character in the game is devoid of any distinctively interesting personality traits other than the kind of clichés you’d see in any old He-man cartoon. He’s the bad guy, can’t you tell because of his evil voice and desire to do evil things? She’s the good guy, she exudes a desire to do wholesome and productive things and says things like ‘You won’t get away with this.’. I don’t want to sound too cynical, but just because you’re trying to appeal to players of all ages doesn’t mean you need to bleach out the characters until they’re just another cardboard cut-out from writer school 101. If you were to blur out the character models I couldn’t tell you if this was a Lara Croft game or any other franchise made into an iso-puzzle-action game.

The game uses a few different devices to get you chopping and changing up your weapons. For example, Lara has to use a magical staff to activate certain puzzles. This means swapping in and out your guns mid-play and occasionally having to hold the staff in a vulnerable position which allows enemies to attack you undefended. You also need to switch over to a grappling hook to scale certain areas or leap a large gap.

The puzzles come in various shapes and sizes, sometimes combining with boss fights

Graphically the game does nothing wrong at all. It’s smooth, shiny, slick and well-themed. The style is very clean, colourful, and bright, almost cartoony, not presenting the kind of gritty darkness that we’ve grown accustomed to in the past with Tomb Raider. Saying that, I did randomly fall through the level at one point, but I’m willing to put it down to incredibly bad luck.

The reality is if you’re looking for this kind of puzzle-action isometric fix, there’s not a shortage of games out there which can offer it. So presumably Lara herself is the lure, however, like I said before the story and characters were, for me, anything but a strong point. That said, this is a decent game with enjoyable puzzle mechanics, a slick combat system and smooth luminous graphics. Just don’t expect any surprises, you’re getting exactly what you see.