Tomb Raider Reloaded - What We Know So Far

It's been a couple of years since adventurer Lara Croft graced game screens in Shadow of the Tomb Raider from 2018, but she's on her way back. The official Tomb Raider Twitter account made the announcement on Nov. 23 that Tomb Raider Reloaded, a mobile game, is now being developed.

Information on the new title is currently limited to the tweet and an accompanying short teaser trailer. Tomb Raider Reloaded is being developed by Emerald City Games and the Square Enix London mobile team, and the YouTube description pegs it as a "free to play action arcade game."

Lara Croft has made it to mobile before, in the 2015 games Lara Croft Go and Lara Croft: Relic Run. The original game and several of the other games in the franchise have also been ported to mobile devices over the years. But this new title appears as if it's going for a more controversial art style as well as a more lighthearted vibe. Here's what we know about the game so far.

According to Square Enix, Tomb Raider Reloaded is set for a 2021 release window on iOS and Android devices. The release will actually coincide with Lara Croft's 25th anniversary: The first Tomb Raider was launched by Eidos Interactive in 1996 for the Sega Saturn. This was followed by its appearance on several other platforms, including the original Sony PlayStation and MS-DOS — and of course, a few movie adaptations. More than 16 games have been released in the series since then.

Fans remain hopeful that more may be coming to celebrate the groundbreaking game's original launch, but so far, there haven't been any other announcements about anything of the sort. This isn't necessarily the exciting news people were expecting about the Tomb Raider franchise as 2021 arrives, but there's still plenty of time for Square Enix to tell gamers that something even bigger is coming to the next generation of gaming consoles. 

Because so little information about the new title has been released so far, only the trailer yields clues about the gameplay. Mainly, the camera pans around a tomb (or a place that looks very much like a tomb), showing a variety of cartoon-style creatures and obstacles that Lara Croft will presumably have to face in the game. These appear to include a giant red and black spider, a rock monster, a T-Rex, and an arrow trap. 

More worrisome to some gamers is the free-to-play aspect. A game that's free-to-play often includes in-game financial transactions such as loot boxes, which get added to games to keep players coming back and to increase its monetary intake. This element has occasionally been done badly in some games. There's no hint of what might be included here, but the addition of microtransactions instantly gets some people's hackles up.

To be honest, the trailer isn't impressing fans much. Comments on the YouTube video and Twitter thread are mixed. Many potential players appear disappointed that fans are getting, as a 25th-anniversary gift, a mobile game that eschews the more realistic art style of previous AAA Tomb Raider games in favor of something less than they hoped for. However, some believe this may mark a return of "classic Lara," complete with her iconic tank top and shorts, bearing a weapon in each hand and fighting giant monsters.

This take on the Tomb Raider series does seem to be much less dark and more fantasy-based than the recent installments of the series, though, which could be an interesting change. The game's style seems cuter than the recent games as well, which could bring in a more general audience of young new fans. However, this is all gamers know for now: Hopefully Square Enix releases more information on Tomb Raider Reloaded soon.