Netflix has just debuted the new Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft series starring Hailey Atwell voicing Croft herself. A great actress, a famed character and on a service with a solid history of animated game adaptations.
And Tomb Raider is just…eh. It’s fine.
Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft has arrived with pretty average reviews, a 62% critic score and a 60% audience score. And it has debuted #9 on Netflix’s Top 10 list, which is not amazing, and I think it may go down rather than up from here.
I couldn’t really get into it past the first two episodes out of eight, as the animation and writing quality just isn’t really there compared to other work. And speaking of other work, Tomb Raider has some big competition when it comes to Netflix gaming adaptations. Compare them:
- Arcane – 100% critic score, 96% audience score
- Cyberpunk Edgerunners – 100% critic score, 95% audience score
- The Witcher: Nightmare of the Wolf – 100% critic score, 83% audience score
- Castlevania: Nocturne – 96% critic score, 45% audience score (this one got review bombed for reasons I can’t even remember now)
- Castlevania – 94% critic score, 89% audience score
- Captain Lazerhawk: A Blood Dragon Remix – 89% critic score, 91% audience score
- Dragon’s Dogma – 83% critic score, 39% audience score
- Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft – 62% critic score, 60% audience score
I may be missing some, but the others I’ve found don’t even have enough critic reviews for a score. And as such, Tomb Raider is the lowest there. The quality is just…off on this one. The show has stumbled into some level of culture war drama with the idea that the traditionally voluptuous Lara Croft is not attractive enough, but that’s neither the case nor related to any of the show’s actual problems. It feels like it’s trying to be a bit like the new Tomb Raider games from Crystal Dynamics, but instead it comes off more like the instantly forgettable Alicia Vikander Tomb Raider movie. And we are miles from the goofy but fun Angelina Jolie era.
It’s a shame that this didn’t pan out well. I mean these are not terrible scores or anything, technically “fresh” right now, but as you can see Netflix has done great work with so many of these other adaptations, this one scoring 30 points below any of them is not what you want to see, unfortunately.
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
