The daily rotation of free games from the Epic Game Store may have ended but life still goes on. And by life we of course mean weekly free games, starting with quite the tempting trio of titles. Until Thursday January 6th you'll be able to get all three "Survivor Trilogy" members of the rebooted Tomb Raider franchise absolutely free through either the EGS web portal or desktop app.
Square Enix rebooted the franchise in 2013 with the not so imaginatively titled Tomb Raider, giving Lara Croft a refreshed origin story and updated graphics. It was perhaps a little underappreciated at the time, primarily due to starting off slowly and relying on quick-time events a little too much in the first hour of gameplay, but Tomb Raider (2013) remains one of the better action-adventure games of the era and an excellent starting-point for the rejuvenated series.
Next came Rise of the Tomb Raider, with a story that followed on a year after the events of Tomb Raider. It delves deeper into the mysteries surrounding Lara's late father and Trinity, the shadowy antagonistic organisation of the first game. Graphics were more polished and environments more varied while music could be dynamically generated according to in-game events. Actually raiding tombs are also more of a significant aspect of the game than in the first title, including both more challenging puzzles and varied rewards.
2018's Shadow of the Tomb Raider is the third and currently last entrant to the rebooted franchise and culmination of the three episode story arch that began in 2013. The Lara seen in this chapter is a woman veteran pre-2013 franchise fans would recognise: supremely knowledgable and capable rather than the rough around the edges rookie who winced her way through the lost island of Yamatai.
Although all three titles sought to introduce new gaming technologies, the most significant was probably the integration of real-time hybrid ray-traced rendering in Shadow of the Tomb Raider. The ray-traced shadows give the game a more immersive feel, but had punishing performance requirements that could only be satisfied by dedicated ray-tracing hardware found on the just-released NVIDIA RTX 20-series GPUs.
Tomb Raider GOTY Edition, Rise of the Tomb Raider: 20 Year Celebration and Shadow of the Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition each appear to include the majority of DLC packs, but bear in mind that the latter two also introduced microtransactions that will not be part of the bundle.
All three titles are well worth a play through as mainstays of the action-adventure genre. Only the final installment could pose a problem to modern hardware (and only then if ray-traced shadows are enabled), and each is a fun way to wile away a dozen or so hours of gaming.
The promotion ends at 4pm GMT on Thursday January 6th, at which time Gods Will Fall will take over as part of the free game promotion.
