It's probably all by design to kill off the IP. Given what the reboot trilogy has done to completely rewrite Lara Croft's personality. Last good Tomb Raider game is still Underworld.
Only thing to look forward to is the TR 1-3 remaster.
It'll be tragic if that happens. It would be a direct consequence of ownership falling into the lap of people who have no understanding nor passion for the IP coupled with little to none idea as to why it was cherished in the first place. Its going to be a mistake if they take a surface-level glance at engagement numbers or some shit like that and draw this asinine fallacy. These business people should be held in check by actual fans and creators. Their creative control/decision making often leads to more damage than maintenance of their IPs.
Its sad, but true. Modern Lara is the antithesis of classic iconic Lara. Its disheartening to watch what some people did to the image of the series.
I actually really liked the gameplay of
2013 and
Rise, but I think
Shadow was a major comedown on both writing and gameplay, a massive disappointment after the preceiding two. Eidos Montreal just could not recreate the magic of Crystal Dynamics.
The idea of Lara starting out kind of naive and innocent and basically "getting hard" through her confrontations with Trinity, that part of the story was fine. But I don't feel she really had much
character in these games. Mostly she's just a walking collection of daddy issues, and once she gets over that, and manages to put an end to Trinity, what's left is just an empty suit that I don't have any real affinity for. I felt zero urgency to learn what happens to Lara after
Shadow. I didn't even feel a dislike, like "oh man do I hate this." I simply flat out really don't care what happens going forward because there's nothing there. It feels like all they committed to was making Lara an asexual heroine with a savior complex. I'd say the best characterization of Lara in this trilogy actually happened in the SotTR tie-in novel
Path Of The Apocalypse which takes place after the prologue in Cozumel but before the main game starts in Peru. This was a Lara I actually enjoyed following and the story was a tense pageturner where the stakes felt high and the novel really takes place "in the moment" and worries far more about where Lara is in that moment and what she's doing and doesn't overly burden itself with the big picture apocalyptic storyline of the core game. It was definitely what I liked best about SotTR as a whole, because the game was so underwhelming.
I've never been a proponent of live action adaptations of video games--I think the only time it truly works well is for something like FMV games where there was already a live action component to it. I'm not sure if we'll ever top the original
Silent Hill film from 2006 in terms of quality, that seems to be the high water mark of video game film adaptations. I can't say that
Tomb Raider has ever done something good on this front yet, and why they keep making more, I don't know. The films were never major blockbusters. The first one with Angelina Jolie did make a decent profit, but it wasn't exactly cheap to make. The sequel performed significantly worse and the reboot only barely broke even. I'd think by this point, they'd stop trying to make live action Lara a thing and just focus on making good games that sell well, but apparently everything has to be a massive multi-media franchise these days and be as sprawling as the MCU in order to be considered a success. Apparently having a series of successful games just isn't good enough to justify an IP's existence anymore.
