Lara Croft: Guardian of Light review (Updated)

There was once a time when the future of mobile gaming felt like the App Store would be bursting with games just like Lara Croft: Guardian of Light. In fact, during that heyday this exact game was on the App Store. Fast forward 15 years later and things have changed pretty dramatically, but the stalwart efforts of Feral Interactive to bring high quality console experiences to mobile have resurrected Lara Croft: Guardian of Light, which is a game that holds up superbly, provided you want to play a controller-centric game on your mobile device.

Lara Croft: Guardian of Light doesn't bear the Tomb Raider label since it is quite the departure from the core series. This game features the same star but in a top-down shooter full of platforming and puzzle challenges as well.

The original release of this game heavily emphasized cooperative play with a second player taking the role of an ancient Mayan warrior, but developer Crystal Dynamics (wisely) handcrafted a single-player variant of its main campaign which has contributed to this game's staying power. Although this Feral release allows players to experience the original multiplayer campaign, it's not a very practical thing to set up both by nature of the platform it's on and the fact that its implementation is online only using a Feral Interactive-specific account login.

It doesn't take long in Lara Croft: Guardian of Light to see how special it is. There's some expert-level pacing and puzzle design at play, as well as a lot of flexibility and customization that lets you approach certain challenges from different angles. If that wasn't enough, each of the game's stages also have a ton of hidden collectibles and side challenges that are both fun to discover and do, whether on your first run through the game or if you come back to it.

The result is a game that feels like a non-stop action ride. Whether it's fighting through hordes of spiders or sprinting down a trap-laden hallway, Lara Croft: Guardian of Light is always ready to throw new obstacles at you, and it doesn't worry too much about trying to justify what's happening moment to moment. The whole experience is centered around doing inventive, novel, and satisfying stuff with the tools available, which sounds like an easy and obvious guiding principle, but few games manage to actual nail this the way it is done here.

As a game that was originally designed to be played with a controller, it should come as no surprise that this mobile release also plays best when you one up to play it. I play many, many action-oriented games using touch controls just fine (and believe that most games that feel bad to play with touch are that way mostly due to flawed design and implementation than that control method being innately worse), but it seems to me that Feral Interactive still hasn't quite cracked the code on theirs yet. It's functional, but feels increasingly awkward to manage in later stages of the game or for completing some of the harder side-challenges.

Otherwise, the port job here is stellar. The game runs smoothly and has cloud save support in addition to the aforemetioned flawless controller support. The game also checkpoints frequently, which makes maintaining progress on a mobile device where you might just be playing in short bursts quite easy and convenient.

Lara Croft: Guardian of Light is one of the better conceived port jobs for mobile. It's design is largely already conducive to the platform and it's a title that has aged beautifully. It's very nice to have a game like this back on the App Store as it is easily among the best action titles available there.