Tomb Raider has been around since the time, well, I’ve been around. So it’s interesting to see how far the franchise has come. The latest iteration of Lara Croft doesn’t really involve spelunking and stopping mummy-like rituals as such, but it does jump on the Archero-like trend among casual games. Incidentally, the game was released a month before Mighty Doom, so the experience is quite similar.

Tomb Raider: Reloaded is a top-down action game for smartphones, with Lara charting her way ahead to find the lost kingdom of Atlantis. In total, there are 13 chapters to finish, each of which offers between 25 and 50 stages to dodge and shoot your way through.

Combat is the forefront experience. Killing enemies grants you coins and Common Manuals to upgrade gear, and experience points to level up during the run. Each time you level up, you’re offered three different passive abilities to choose from that affect how you perform in combat. These two operate in tandem to extend your survivability every run.

The variety of passive abilities grows once you get past the first two chapters, at which point the difficulty ramps up and turns the game into a Bullet Hell experience. And that’s all thanks to the interesting enemies you fight, each of which has a different behaviour to follow through — a design similarly found in Archero more than in Mighty Doom.

A nice touch to the game is the intentional level design to keep the challenge of traversal fresh all the time. Cover options give you the breathing space you need to dance between incoming projectiles and bullets.

However, the expedition into the game is not without its pitfalls. From a greater view, the game is an ignorable derivative that can leave fans puzzled as to what it’s trying to do for them.

Puzzles are reduced to nothing more than stepping on platforms in a sequence. I don’t know what makes this engaging, but it does diminish the spirit of puzzle mechanics the Tomb Raider series is known for.

What’s interesting is how, as you progress and skill up, you begin to grow more and more as a spectator than a participant from a mechanical standpoint, as the game “plays itself” for you. For example, in certain boss fights, you could camp in a corner, occasionally move Lara out of the way of a stray enemy attack, and let the game do its job.

On a minor note, the game’s user interface felt slightly convoluted to me. I thought you could play the Active Events, but those are simply a list of things you could do DURING a run. So the visual design created a small gulf of evaluation.

VERDICT: Tomb Raider: Reloaded has a decent mix-and-match meta gameplay, but it could’ve been more than just another auto-battler trying hard to capitalise on a trend. I rate it a five out of 10.