Lara Croft Go may be the unlikeliest name for a game whose measure you take in thousands of discrete steps. Swipe-swipe-swipe goes my finger on the iPad's screen, each one prompting a tiny potato-textured rendition of Lara Croft to leap or tumble between nodes laid along tracks woven through exotic environs. At each diamond-marked point, she halts, a transient statue in endless jungle and subterranean tableaus. Lara Croft Stops a Lot seems more apt.
I kid, because I love that this version of Lara leans more toward thinker than fighter. It's brimming with clever stumpers that require bouts of lateral thinking. Also, who else is making compulsively playable turn-based games out of world-renowned action franchises these days?
Square Enix Montreal, that's who, and it's testament to the team behind a $4.99 iOS game that bears comparison to chess that it feels so kinetic and fluid. It's also admirably more than a re-skin of last fall's likewise turn-driven Hitman Go. Lara Croft Go shares DNA with the latter, but it's much more action-angled.
Hitman Go was about steering literal figurines emblematic of the Hitman series' dramatis personae around tiny boards. The characters weren't animated, and so the setup felt more like a boardgame, which seemed like an odd thing to do to a revered stealth franchise. But its boards were deceptively simple: tiny areas that nonetheless supported multiple win states, some of which you could measure in metrics like how many turns it took to clear a board.
Lara Croft Go, by contrast, arrives fully animated, allowing 1996-era Lara (in tee and counterintuitive short-shorts) to dash athletically along room-for-one-only paths that range in straight lines or intersectional clusters through tropical forests, Mesoamerican ruins, and cavernous labyrinths. Areas eventually bristle with snakes, lizards, or spiders, as well as inanimate hazards like boulders, sawblades and fractured floors or walls that collapse if you step on them more than once.
But like you, those enemies and objects must move one node at a time, and then only when you do. Finding your way through a board's brain-tanglers is thus down to figuring out how to properly sequence things, avoiding moves that stalemate, if not checkmate, your progress. Think "there was a young woman who swallowed the lever to operate the platform that knocked off the boulder to flatten the spider."
Square Enix does a laudable job giving those challenges their own wrinkles. Snakes will insta-kill if you approach head-on, so must be flanked or shot from behind. Lizards spot you from two steps away and pursue you forever, but follow strictly in your footsteps. Spiders move actively back and forth along fixed paths, and require exacting calculation to slip by unharmed. Toss in single-use weapons like spears for ranged attacks and torches that drive your enemies back, and the sequencing difficulties multiply.
There's just one problem. Where Hitman Go allowed multiple solutions per board, Lara Croft Go supports only one. My way is your way, which becomes Square Enix Montreal's way of charging you five more bucks for the fixed puzzle solutions if you get stuck.
It's a shortcoming exacerbated by the game's brief length, and that once you've found your way through a board, terra incognito becomes terra firma. If you're halfway decent, you'll clear all of the boards in a handful of hours, and while you can revisit levels to poke around for missed collectibles, the puzzles are all rehash.
The collectible game left me confused, too, relying too much on object-environment color sameness and atmospheric trickery—a Where's Waldo screen hunt where you just look around the screen and tap stuff. What do all the collectible gems and pieced-together artifacts unlock? Alternative outfits for Lara, which, you know, might be interesting if there were reasons to revisit cleared areas.
But if you accept Lara Croft Go for what it is, meaning something you'll only play a handful of times, put it this way: It's a shoo-in for "best turn-based action puzzler I only wish they'd filled with more to do" of 2015.
