Rise of the Tomb Raider: Baba Yaga - Temple of the Witch DLC (Xbox One)

Rise of the Tomb Raider was a great game, it took years to come out after the first release of the rebooted franchise. In the mean time, we have DLC to tie us over while we wait to hear about a third game.

In my opinion, this is the only real story DLC they brought out. I'm not saying the others are bad or anything, the others are just really short or not featured in the main game. You can start this straight from the main game by finding the area on the map. You start in an original area of the game and soon travel to a new area, adding more to the value. Lara encounters a woman named Nadia, hiding in a locker as you take out her attackers. She is looking for her grandfather, who went off looking for her grandmother, after he believes she was killed by a witch, known as Baba Yaga. Lara agrees to help find her relatives, thus starting the story.

We get new outfits and weapons, but the biggest addition is a new type of arrow. We get confusion arrows, they work like poison arrows, anyone caught in the blast will start to attack each other. I loved the supernatural feeling this gives you, a witch villain and the hallucinations caused to Lara are really creepy, let's just say there's a house that can walk, with chicken legs! The missions and puzzles were like normal, challenging, but the final boss fight against the witch was so well done. You started from the ground and would keep getting higher as you fought her. It's by far the best part of the DLC.

There were a tonne of glitches are bugs though, one of the challenges had you shoot these hanging skulls, two of them were constantly spinning out of control and were a real nightmare. An enemy went into the concept stance while fighting, that had never happened before, as well as the game randomly shutting down. At times there were no lip syncing, and when there was it was pretty bad. At one point, Lara came out of the water and was coughing, water came pouring out her mouth like a waterfall as she coughed, it looked terrible! DLC once again are often poorly made and overpriced.

That being said, it was enjoyable, it's just a shame it brought a host of new bugs that really let it down. If you picked up the season pass you get a shit load of content, it's not bad, even at full price. If it's ever on sale, I can't see why you'd turn down the pass or this DLC separately.

3.1/5