I absolutely adored Hitman Go when it came out a while back, and now Square Enix Montréal did it again with the "GO" treatment over the Tomb Raider franchise. They did it quite well, keeping the spirit of exploration and puzzle solving alive and well while making the whole experience feel like a board game with very intricate pieces. Perhaps because of technical issues - due to old hardware? Hard to say - my experience wasn't as smooth as I would've preferred. Some small choices on the way puzzles were designed did frustrate me a little as well, but overall I really enjoyed this game.
In this isometric puzzle-like game, the only controls you have are to swipe in various directions to have Lara Croft move and perform a few actions while doing so, such as automatically killing enemies, activating levers, climbing cliffs, and the like. I don't remember exactly how movement worked in Hitman GO, but I remember it being more responsive than the swipes which would sometimes require two or three attempts to get the intended movement. You use these actions and your wits to solve complex puzzle rooms with new mechanics getting added from time to time in order to explore some tombs while avoiding many dangers.
While doing so, you can tap on "hidden" jars in the environment to collect gems or idol pieces, which reward you with cosmetic changes, as far as I've seen. This is a bit pointless, especially because on my ipad 3, collecting anything would lag the game for a good five to ten seconds, forcing me after a while to stop caring about the collectibles and just ignore them when I saw them. I have to say that this game was more demanding to my device than Hitman GO was; simply loading a new level - with an animation of a crumbled doorway crashing down behind you - also lagged the whole thing in a ugly way. Maybe having a more recent device would've improved this part of LCGO for me, but at the same time the hidden collectible system didn't grab me at all.
That's about the only part that bothered me, really. Everything else was really fun and interesting to play around. You start with a few simple puzzles - navigating a room with snakes, for instance - and the game makes you learn the specific mechanics of these puzzles, first with basic concepts, ramping up to adding multiple traps together to form something that'll require you to try again multiple times. In some instances its as easy as figuring out in which order to do specific actions, others will require some turn-based timing of events, others are just logic puzzles that you'll figure out after some thinking. If you want to pay 6$ to unlock all the solutions, you could do that too, but it would kinda ruin the game, wouldn't it?
Lara Croft GO is a really neat little puzzle game that throws a ton of traps and obstacles your way while keeping the board game aesthetic that worked so well with its spiritual predecessor. I didn't manage to finish it like I did with Hitman, but I still had a great time with it. I was a bit bummed that some puzzle rooms were split into smaller puzzles and that quitting the game would force you to restart from the beginning, and I wish that it ran better on my device, but overall, my impression is positive.
