Video Game / Tomb Raider II

Don't you think you've seen enough?

Fiama Nera Thug: Somehow, you don't behave like you got a monk's blood...

Lara: I understand that is somehow in my favor, so indulge me about the dagger. I'd be indebted with your life.

Fiama Nera Thug: These doors are waiting for the right one, the right time to arrive, and then the dagger's blade will honor the hearts of those who believe...

Tomb Raider II is the second game in the Tomb Raider series. The sequel to Tomb Raider I, it was released in 1997 for the PlayStation and PC; a Sega Saturn version was planned but dropped due to technical limitations. The next year, another sequel was released, titled Tomb Raider III.

Lara is after the legendary Dagger of Xian, which is said to give its owner "the power of a dragon". She finds herself in conflict with Italian mob boss/cult leader Marco Bartoli, who is after the same item. Locations in the game include Venice, an offshore oil rig, the sunken ocean liner Maria Doria, Tibet, and the Great Wall of China.

The game was generally considered as an Even Better Sequel, although many considered it to have too much combat (the final kill-streak is well above 400).

In 2023, it was announced that this game, along with the rest of the original Tomb Raider trilogy, would receive an HD Remaster for PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X, which got released on February 14, 2024.

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This game features examples of:

• 100% Completion: Like in the previous game, there are hidden areas or locations that require specific movements to reach. Unlike the previous game, each secret contains a dragon statue that grants nothing at first. However, collecting all three statues in a level rewards you with a hefty supply of ammo, health kits, or sometimes a new gun if you didn't get it yet. Getting all the secrets will grant you all weapons and unlimited ammunition on the next gameplay.
• Actionised Sequel: Much more gunplay and human enemies to be found and fought in this game, and this was about the only point of contention compared to the predecessor.
• Advertising Campaigns: The U.S. had a rather infamous series of them: A camera would roam areas where men would be found: Bars, men's bathrooms, basketball courts, and strip clubs; said venues were empty, because these men were all at home playing the latest Tomb Raider game. The slogan was, "Lara's back."
• A.I. Breaker: The Guardian at the end of the Ice Palace level will stop chasing Lara if she stands on a ledge or platform that's too high for it to reach, which is normal. However, standing in certain places on the ground level will also achieve the same effect despite the boss logically being able to reach and attack Lara. It will still flee after you shoot it until you get back on its level.
• All the Worlds Are a Stage: The Temple of Xian uses all the traps and gimmicks that you've encountered throughout your adventure; swinging blades, Spikes of Doom, spiked walls that close in on you, swinging spiked balls, trapdoors, collapsing floors, Descending Ceiling large rolling boulders, springboards, and lots of swimming. The whole level practically screams The Very Definitely Final Dungeon, but you actually have to deal with a few more levels afterwards.
• Ancient Tradition: The many rituals surrounding the Dagger of Xian.
• Anti-Frustration Feature:
  • Like in the previous game, there's one level where your equipment is stolen, but you still get to keep all the ammo and medi-packs you collected. Two of the sunken ship's levels will have you take mandatory fall damage that requires you to be at full health to survive (though the first one can be reduced significantly with a few clever manoeuvres) and both instances will have a large health pack next to the drop just in case you don't have any. As the game is much longer than the previous one, it helps immensely that you can now save at any point, including on the PlayStation version.
  • When playing with the remastered graphics, there are several new light sources added to the mandatory path in dark areas which is presumably intended to avoid the player having to possibly search for switches in near pitch-black areas if they run out of flares.
• Art Evolution: Lara got a significant visual upgrade in this game: Not only does she sport her signature braid in gameplay with its own physics engine that reacts to player movement, but she also has breasts that actually look like breasts, unlike the boxy, overly pointy ones from the first game.
• Artistic License – Biology:
  • Not that glaring, since the entire game runs on Rule of Cool, but Lara would suffer from decompression sickness. First she dives for at least 40 fathoms (which is over 70 meters), then very quickly ascends from that depth and then hijacks a plane, flying at high altitude, all in very quick succession.
  • Lara spends the entirety of the shipwreck levels barefoot, unaffected by the rough sea floor, the many rusty ship floors, or the broken glass you can safely walk through. If this weren't a game, her feet would be torn up and have some nasty infections. The enemy thugs actually have the right idea for once; wearing actual protective footwear.
  • Real life snow leopards have stubby legs and a relatively compact frame (at least for a big cat), but the snow leopards in the Tibet levels have longer limbs and more robust physiques. The out-of-story reason is that they are reskinned tiger models.
• Ascended Glitch: A well-known glitch called the "corner bug" allows Lara to warp to the top of tall structures and explore normally unreachable areas, the most significant being the roof of her mansion. The mobile port actually rewards the player with a secret achievement for getting up there.
• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • The dagger of Xian is this, changing the user into a dragon after stabbing themselves in the chest with it. Permanently. And with a relatively big weakness.
  • The M-16 is devilishly powerful... but Lara has to switch from firing from the shoulder to hip-firing and back when the player starts/stops moving in any capacity. Thus certain moves like flipping right or left will result in a constant pause in firing pattern. This makes it less effective than just using the Uzis. In addition to the delay in firing, if you run firing into a room, then have to stop moving for proper aiming.
  • The grenade launcher, both the weapon itself and where it's found. The weapon fires at a low arc and reloads slowly, making the weapon less than ideal on mobile targets. The weapon can be found in the very first level if you found all the dragon statues, but it's located in a deep pit that has two T. rexes hunting you down.
  • The skidoo with mounted weapons. Cool, and great for mowing down enemies, but its lack of a throttle means it can't cross any of the huge jumps that litter the level, like its weaponless counterpart can and in the base game there are very few enemies you can actually fight with it though Golden Mask's level design makes it much more useful.
• Bad Boss: During their flight with Lara hidden on board, Marco punches his pilot in the gut simply because said pilot merely suggested that Marco could be looking in the wrong place for the Seraph. This causes the plane to go into a nosedive for several seconds until the pilot recovers and regains control of the plane.
• Bigfoot, Sasquatch, and Yeti: Part of the game takes place in Tibet, so obviously yetis make an appearance. Then there is the Guardian, meant to be a Garuda, at the end of the Ice Palace level.
• Blatant Lies: The back cover of the original game promised "smoother control system" and "refined game engine". While both elements did get some form of refinement, they both largely remained the same, and would continue to do so for three more games.
• Book Ends:
  • The game starts at the Great Wall of China and the end of Lara's adventure also ends at the same location (excluding the epilogue level, Home Sweet Home... and even that one could potentially count if you consider Lara's Home as taking place before the events of the game).
  • The first Gold Dragon secret in the game, in The Great Wall level, requires that Lara climb down into a deep, dangerous valley instead of using the zipline right away. The very final Gold Dragon, in the Floating Islands level, requires you to do the same thing at the end of that level as well...minus T. rex fights. The fact that the situation mirrors the first one is supposed to be the clue to lead the player to it.
• Boring, but Practical: The shotgun, full stop. Medium range, medium power, common ammo, still perfectly fine against the lion share of enemies. To a lesser extent, the automatic handguns, which are basic pistols in every regard, but with double the damage. They even outclass Uzis in terms of effectiveness/damage output despite Uzis having significantly higher fire rate. Tested and confirmed.
• Boss-Only Level: The Dragon's Lair, the penultimate level, consists of nothing more than facing off against reanimated jade statues and blade-throwing cultists before you start taking on the titular dragon, and can be beaten in roughly five minutes.
• Bottomless Magazines: Played absolutely straight with basic dual pistols, that don't need to be reloaded and come with an infinite supply of bullets. Then there is most of the remaining weapons, which come with a limited ammo count, but never need to be reloaded. The only exceptions are the Harpoon Gun (needs to be reloaded each 4 shots) and Grenade Launcher (reloaded after each shot).
• Bottomless Pits: One of the main hazards in the first half of Floating Islands.
• Breaking the Fourth Wall: After finishing the final level, Lara goes to take a shower and is about to undress until she turns to face the camera and says "Don't you think you've seen enough?" before grabbing her shotgun and shooting the camera out. Which itself comes with further meaning - the developers told Eidos after finishing their work they were not going to make another Tomb Raider game unless they were given a break.
• Chase Scene: A positively epic cutscene after the Ice Palace level. It involves Lara in a car chase in snowy mountains, explosions, jumping over chasms and shooting with the baddies.
• Climax Boss: The confrontation with a dragon definitely qualifies.
• Continuity Nod: When starting the tutorial level, Lara mentions that after that gruelling business last year, she decided to build an assault course to build up her skills.
• Crazy-Prepared: Lara starts the game with her pistols, a shotgun, a health kit, and flares. She also has a gun cabinet in her bedroom next to her bed that contains a shotgun, ammo, health packs, and flares, which comes in handy in the final level when her home gets invaded.
• Dark Horse Victory: In a generation-spanning conflict between mafia cultists and an ancient order of Tibetan monks, where neither side has made plans that take a certain self-starting, interloping Adventurer Archaeologist into account, guess who wins?
• Deadly Rotary Fan: The Opera House has several of them inside vents and there's many slopes that will gladly send you sliding to your doom if you stumble upon them. The Oil Rig has fans that are much larger, underwater, and can suck you into them with their currents.
• Death Is a Slap on the Wrist: Thanks to the ability to save at any point, dying is trivial as long as you save frequently. The trope is much more apparent on the PC version where you can save across multiple slots without any loading whatsoever, in a way similar to save states.
• Dénouement Episode: While the main story itself is concluded once Lara retrieves the dagger and escapes from the Collapsing Lair, there's one more level you have to play afterwards that involve the remaining henchman of the Big Bad invading Lara's mansion to get revenge on her. Only by completing this level will resolve the loose ends and having the credits roll.
• Direct Continuous Levels: Much like the game before it, most levels continue immediately where the previous left off—and, also like the previous game, certain pairs of levels interlock with each other in some way (most noticeably with "Catacombs of the Talion" and "Ice Palace"), suggesting these were originally single levels before being split into two, though unlike the first game there's no indication of this in the level file names.
• Distant Prologue: The opening cutscene takes place somewhere in ancient China.
• Double Unlock: Done as a story element to prevent the dagger artifact from being misused. Want access to the dagger? Go find the Talion to unlock the door. Know where the Talion is? Great! Make sure you found the Seraph first so you can unlock the door leading to the palace that contains the Talion in the first place!
• Early Game Hell: The very first level will easily get new players killed and even veteran players of Tomb Raider can get tripped up by the high difficulty at the start. The traps and optional T. rex encounters will be the source of death for most. You're also stuck with the weak starting pistols and slow firing shotgun unless you managed to find all three dragon statues to snag the grenade launcher. Luckily, the later levels are not quite as fiendish at the first one, but they still require you to be on your toes.
• Easy Level Trick: Venice is built around reaching a timed gate in the motorboat before it closes. The whole thing is triggered by exiting the flooded cellar using a sloped ramp. However there's a small gap under the cellar door, which is just enough tall to swim through, and exiting the cellar this way doesn't trigger the countdown, which makes half of the tasks^*to create a shortcut for the motorboat in the level completely unnecessary. You don't even need said motorboat nor have to dispose of the water mines before the gate.
• Elite Mook: The muscular Dual Wielding revolver mook that can make quick work of you if you're not careful. He's also highly resilient to your bullets unless you decide to blast him with the grenade launcher. He only shows up twice in two separate levels.
• Every Car Is a Pinto: The jeep chasing Lara in the cutscene instantly explodes after rolling over. The snowmobiles you drive can also explode if falls from a large height upon landing.
• Everything Trying to Kill You: The areas Lara explores are so hostile that the universe itself seems to be relentlessly attempting to kill her. In the first level alone, Lara is set upon by ravenous tigers, spike traps, shuriken traps, aggressive carnivorous birds, vicious tarantulas and shot at by a fanatical assassin guarding a door. This ramps up to the extent that in the Opera House you can even be killed by huge shards of broken glass apparently glued vertically to the floor and the weighted bags used to raise the curtains.
• Excuse Plot: Roughly three quarters of the game is spent on finding a key to open a gate. A pretty regular, wooden gate that by all means should barely hold together at this point of history. It gets extra points for Lara's style of work. If the door had been opened after the first level, the plot would be resolved within four levels and without Lara having to fend off a home invasion. Heck, the entire plot could be summed up as "Get magic artifact before the bad guy does." It also doesn't help that the game has the least amount of cutscenes compared to the rest of the games in the franchise.
• Exposed to the Elements: Lara travels throughout the Tibetan mountainside wearing nothing but her shorts and a leather jacket, which aren't exactly suitable for a cold region. Lara can swim in the Tibetan waters without suffering from hypothermia as well (these were all averted in the next game).
• Fan Remake: Nicobass, an established level-maker, is currently working as the leader of a four-person project (original was made by the team of 8) focused on remaking the entirety of Tomb Raider II using Unreal Engine 4. A demo of the first level is already released. More details can be found on the project's site. It's often referred by the fandom as the "20th Anniversary Game". Unfortunately, development seems to be on hiatus now as there haven't been any updates since the release of the demo. So much that the remake is on verge of plummeting into Development Hell.
• Fear-Induced Idiocy: The "40 Fathoms" level begins with a cutscene of Lara hitching a ride on the outside of a Fiamma Nera submersible. The pilot of the submarine is about to yank Lara off with a mechanical claw when he sees a great white shark swimming in the direction of his cockpit glass and freaks out. While great whites are notorious apex predators, the guy was inside a fairly large metal vehicle that would've adequately protected him from the big fish. Nevertheless, the panicked pilot veers away — and right into an underwater cliff, wrecking the sub. Ironically, it's only after this happens that the shark circles back around to the sub to eat the dead pilot now that the glass is no longer blocking the way.
• Final Dungeon Preview: The game begins at the Great Wall, the first China level. It's actually very oddly difficult for a first level, but gives a bit of a prelude of things to come when you return to China for the final three levels at the end of the game since there's danger almost everywhere, requiring you to think fast and carefully if you're to get through.
• Final-Exam Boss: Temple of Xian, technically the penultimate level, is the game throwing the gauntlet and saying "Show me what you've learned so far". It's exceedingly difficult and long, but if one was playing the game fair and square up until that point, it's also a very rewarding experience, for it tests every single skill players mastered up to this point. It's saying that Temple of Xian is often listed in various "top 5s" of the best levels ever made for Tomb Raiders, despite its infamy as pushing it to the limit.
• Foreboding Architecture: As if titling the level "The Dragon's Lair" wasn't enough, the room where Lara finds Marco Bartoli is just one, huge, empty chamber with a few water pits.
• Foreshadowing: The opening FMV shows China's emperor meeting his demise when a monk pulls out the dagger from the dragon's belly. This is how you defeat Bartoli in the final showdown.
• Friendly Fireproof: Lara is immune to her own grenades, even if she shoots enemies literally standing next to her.
• Game-Breaking Bug: You can damage the frozen jade warriors before they come alive using your grenade launcher, but if you actually deplete their health points to zero before they then, it causes the game to crash.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation: The first level ends when Lara reaches a door in a cave. There's a tiger just before the door, but if you just run past it and get to the door, the game immediately goes into a cutscene taking place right there in the cave, with no indication of what happened to the tiger.
• Giant Mook: A few of Bartoli's goons are positively massive, being easily twice Lara's size, and can take some serious amount of ammo to finally drop.
• Giant Spider: They show up in the Temple of Xian. Fortunately, they are rare, because they can take serious punishment.
• Girliness Upgrade: Not by a wide margin, however compared to the first game, Lara sports a long ponytail, bigger lips, and an actual curvaceous figure, instead of 45 degree angle breasts.
• Glass Cannon:
  • The Dobermans in Venice have a vicious bite, but don't require many bullets to take down.
  • Flamethrower men are another example. It really won't take much to drop them, but their flamethrowers have enormous range and getting hit is guaranteed death unless you're near water.
• Go Back to the Source: Lara journeys to the Great Wall of China to obtain the Dagger of Xian. Unfortunately, the door leading to it requires a special key to unlock. Lara then goes on a wild adventure, taking her to Italy (to follow a mob boss and see if he knows anything), an off shore oil rig (where she meets a tortured monk who reveals that the item Lara seeks needs another key first before she can gain access), a deep sea wrecked ship (where the second key is held), the mountains of Tibet (where she obtains the special first key needed), and finally, back to the Great Wall with the required key to unlock the door.
• The Great Wall: Accept no substitute. On the other hand, the game clearly copies the Beijing-area section of the wall, while taking place somewhere in northwest China.
• Grenade Launcher: It can be obtained as soon as the very first level. It's the most powerful weapon in the game, able to instantly kill all non-bosses in a single shot.
• Grimy Water: The Diving Area has one pit filled with a toxic sludge that will kill Lara instantly if she falls into it.
• Guide Dang It!: Most of the secrets aren't too difficult to find as long as you're paying attention and search carefully, but there are few exceptions for that:
  • You are probably going to blow up one of the statues in Bartoli's Hideout on your first playthrough, without even knowing about it.
  • The gold dragon in the Diving Area is hidden at the very end of the level. You'll miss it if you go tend to the fallen monk instead of searching the nearby room. Better hug that wall to avoid triggering the end cinematic.
  • The gold dragon statue in the Catacombs of the Talion is accessible by climbing up the walls and then turning around to spot the item. Very easy by itself, but the textures for the climbable surface blends in with the wall so much that it's quite easy to assume that it's just a normal wall.
  • The gold dragon statue in the Ice Palace takes the cake for being super obscure to find. The room it's in is hidden behind a movable block whose texture almost perfectly blends in with the surrounding walls. Not only that, but the statue itself is across a large gap that appears to have no platforms to jump on at all unless you notice the lighting across the gap is slightly off and land on the invisible walkway.
  • Unless you manage to catch a glimpse of it after exiting the drop into the caverns below where the Dagger was in the Temple of Xian, you may never even see the Gold Dragon. You have to know that during the slide down the waterway, you must be sliding backwards and grab the edge before it drops you into the underground lake and shimmy over to the opening it sits in.
  • Obtaining the key to hut in Tibetan Foothills involves traveling to the far end of the level, setting off a small avalanche and then salvaging the key from under the rubble. There's no clue leading to the key actually being there except the same basic premise of searching every nook and cranny of the level hoping that you'll eventually find the key.
• Guns Akimbo: It wouldn't be a Tomb Raider game without this trope. Lara's signature twin pistols return, along with dual semi-automatic pistols and dual Uzis.
• Hammerspace: Probably the most extreme case in entire franchise. Due to the way how secrets were changed in this instalment, it is entirely possible to end up with thousands of bullets to different guns by the game end, not to mention the collection of the guns itself.
• Hard Levels, Easy Bosses: The game's difficulty comes from the level design where you have to make a lot of precise and tricky jumps through many obstacles. There are only two bosses in the entire game and they're pretty easy to handle; the first boss can easily be cheesed while the second one isn't too difficult provided that you always keep moving to avoid being roasted.
• Harpoon Gun: Makes its first appearance in the entire franchise. For obvious reasons useful mostly underwater and rather as a last-resort weapon - facing sharks with it is a really stupid idea.
• Healthy Green, Harmful Red: Lara Croft's health bar is shown as a colour gradient: from red to green. The more damage Lara takes, the more her life bar depletes to the red colour until it fades completely.
• Infinity -1 Sword: As par the tradition, the humble shotgun. This time around, Lara starts her adventure with one. The stopping power is very good, ammo is plentiful and it remains a reliable option till the very end. It's also Lara's only weapon in the final level. Likewise, the automatic pistols has good stopping power and ammo is plentiful until the much stronger Uzis are found.
• Infinity +1 Sword: The grenade launcher once you complete the game since it, along with the other weapons, gets infinite ammo.
• Instant-Win Condition: Crossing the level's end line will end the level then and there, unless there is a boss to face first.
• Invisible Block: The gold dragon statue in the Ice Palace level sits in a room with seemingly no way to reach it. There's actually a row of invisible blocks you can stand on to reach the statue, but nothing hints at the block's existence.
• Jump Scare: There's a lever underwater in the Living Quarters level that's guarded by a giant eel. You won't know it's even there until you approach the lever where the creature will quickly lash out at you. Not only does the eel look scary, it uses the same chomping sound as the sharks and will inflict heavy damage on you if it manages to bite you.
• Key Under the Doormat: Lara steals one of Fiamma Nera jeeps this way, finding the keys behind the sun visor.
• Lava Is Boiling Kool-Aid: Zig-Zagged: red pools of presumably lava show up in the Temple of Xian, but more classically lava-like obstacles are in the very next level.
• Living Statue: Frozen jade warriors appear in the penultimate levels of the game; they animate after Lara does certain things near them. A glitch (in both the PC and PlayStation versions) allows Lara to damage them with grenades while they're still frozen, allowing her to pick them off easily before they can wake up, which in the Dragon's Lair in particular can save you a lot of hassle.
• Logical Weakness: The dagger of Xian is the only thing keeping the person turned into a dragon alive. Should it be removed, the dragon dies and instantly decomposes.
• Ludicrous Gibs: The best way to describe the effect grenades have on enemies.
• The Mafia: The main antagonists of the game and doubles as a cult. Their leader, Marco Bartoli, seeks out the Dagger of Xian so that he can claim its powers for himself.
• Marathon Level:
  • The entire game can feel like this. Not counting the very first level, each of them takes at least 30 to 45 minutes to get through and that's assuming you already know what to do and where to go. Without that knowledge, the time needed easily quadruples. Due to this the game, while having half the levels, is almost as long as the infamously long Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation. On the plus side, certain levels are so well designed they feel too short, while taking hours to pass.
  • Barkhang Monastery is a massive, sprawling maze where you have to find 5 missing prayer wheels, most of them hidden at the end of long puzzles and/or trap hallways.
  • The Temple of Xian is practically the longest level in the entire game. It's so long that you can grab all three secrets within the first 30 minutes of the level, which means the rest of the level is a big slog through puzzles, traps, platforming, and a good amount of swimming.
• Master of All: The Uzis. Great range, best fire rate, plentiful ammo (it's possible to carry two thousand rounds in spare, while extensively using the weapon throughout the game), sufficient stopping power and possible to use while jumping and running around. The developers knew of this since every level from the Tibetan Foothills and later practically showers you with ammo for the Uzis.
  • The automatic pistols even more so. They're more ammo effective than Uzis and ammunition is also very plentiful. Not as plentiful as for Uzis but the greater damage per shot and better accuracy compensate for that more than enough.
• Mercy Rewarded: Did you know that, in this game where you mindlessly blast away at everything that moves, if you elect not to shoot the monks inhabiting the monastery they'll leave you alone and, even better, attack your mutual enemies?
• Misidentified Weapons: Once again, the Uzis are played by Mac-10s.
• More Dakka: The Uzis and M-16 will make short work of enemies with a lot of bullets. The gun mounted snowmobile can also rip anything to shreds.
• My Rules Are Not Your Rules: The NPCs are immune to environmental hazards. Demonstrated here.
• Near-Villain Victory: Despite Lara navigating all of the Temple of Xian to reach the dagger again, she is too late when Marco arrives to take the dagger and stab himself in the heart with it and gains the power of the dragon. Lara then has to spend two levels catching up to Marco, fight his dragon form, and then take the dagger out of his belly once he's incapacitated. In a way, Marco does succeed over Lara in getting the dagger and could have caused chaos in the world, but it's Lara's narrow victory over him that caused his plans to fail.
• New Game Plus: If you found all secrets and begin new game immediately after beating it, you'll be rewarded with the entire arsenal and it won't require any ammunition to use.
• New World Tease: There's a small area early on in the Catacombs of the Talion level that overlooks the boss arena of the next level, Ice Palace. Earlier on, in the Offshore Rig level, there's a door on top of a sloped platform that a mook descends from and closes once you go near it; this door leads into a hallway that's part of the next level, Diving Area (namely, the one where you encounter four Dobermans and a flamethrower mook).
• No-Gear Level: Lara gets captured by Bartoli's crew and is locked up in the oil rig with all of her guns taken away. You're forced to dodge gunmen and solve a few puzzles before you can get your pistols back.
• No OSHA Compliance: The offshore rig is so incredibly dangerous that it's puzzling that Bartoli's goons are able to get any work done without killing themselves. Features include:
  • Open grilles shooting lethal flames casually located in the middle of a storage area.
  • Several massive underwater propellers with no safety guards that seem to serve no discernible purpose except to chew up anyone who falls in the water. One of these even makes traversing an area of the facility impossible until it's switched off.
  • A circular saw big enough to slice a man in half with no blade guard that runs constantly and can only be turned off with a circuit board that has to be inserted into it.
  • One area inexplicably consists of very high catwalk with big gaps in it, with a long drop into very deep water below.
  • Heavy oil barrels are stored on their sides on a steep ramp in front of a door, and are shown to arbitrarily roll down and crush anything in their way.
• Not Completely Useless: The M16 rifle is unwieldy to use while on the move, thus most players will usually not bother using the gun. It absolutely shines in the first half of the Floating Islands level where the enemies are statues that come to life from a distance and fly slowly towards you, making the M16 an excellent weapon to snipe them with.
• Nothing Is Scarier: While the draw distance has improved from the last game, everything beyond said draw distance is a black void. This makes for a very chilling effect at the start of the 40 Fathoms level where you start off at the bottom of the seabed with no source of light and surrounded by pitch darkness everywhere while you try to find a source of air as a shark swims after you. This is also the case for Floating Islands, with its black bottomless pits everywhere.
• Oddball in the Series: While the sequel retains the core elements of the classic games, it uses many things that the other games don't enforce:
  • Lara has only a grand total of three cutscenes where she speaks (not counting the tutorial segment where she speaks to the player). She doesn't even talk to Marco. Likewise, Marco speaks in only two scenes and rarely makes any appearances.
  • Lara starts her adventure with a shotgun in addition to her pistols. No other game has her start with weaponry beyond the pistols.
  • The game's secrets are regulated to three dragon statues, which also means every level (except the penultimate and final levels, which don't have any secrets) has exactly three secrets to find.
  • Compared to the other games, the second game has a lot of human enemies for Lara to kill.
  • The final level takes place in Lara's home. No other game would have a level take place there until Tomb Raider: Underworld.
  • The Guardian of the Talion (Ice Palace) and the dual wielding revolver mook (Home Sweet Home) requires Lara to kill them in order to complete the level. Other games would stick with having Lara reach the level's exit to finish it while killing a boss would allow Lara to progress through rest of the level.
• Optional Boss: The two T. rexes in The Great Wall level, guarding a grenade launcher. You know, in the very first level of the game.
• Our Dragons Are Different: Chinese-style dragons, with hefty dose of western influences. Not to mention they are created by a magical dagger with a power to scale up.
• Outrun the Fireball: After escaping the temple with the dagger in hand, Lara races to escape the fireball coming up behind her before she makes one final leap to freedom outside. The temple promptly explodes and takes out a guardhouse at the Great Wall.
• Overshadowed by Awesome: Pretty much every other weapon is made completely obsolete the moment Uzis are found. That's in the third level of the game. Out of 18.
• Permanently Missable Content: Did you blow up the side of the opera house in Bartoli's Hideout? Congrats, for you just blew up the jade dragon statue and screwed yourself out of a secret. Other secrets and items can also be lost forever if you advance past the Point of No Return.
• Pervert Revenge Mode: After annihilating the remaining Fiama Nera members, Lara is about to take her well-earned shower when she spots the player attempting to take a peek at the corner of her eye before shooting the camera.
• Plot Coupon: Lara needs to find the Seraph, a key unlocking the vault containing the Talion, a key to the Temple of Xian, where the Dagger of Xian is stored. Made even more blatant when you realise the Temple access is blocked by nothing more than a basic wooden gate.
• Plunger Detonator: Seen near the end of Bartoli's Hideout, though Lara needs to find the key before she can use it.
• Point of No Return: Some levels have certain points that will prevent you from backtracking. Go past that point and you will miss out on any items and secrets you didn't find.
• Post-Climax Confrontation: The final level happens a few days after the main events of the game and includes the remaining Fiamma Nera forces trying to storm Croft Manor.
• Press X to Die: While a lot more complicated than pressing a single button to die, some cheat codes, when activated, happens to make Lara explode. The codes in question are the same as used in the previous game.
• Properly Paranoid: The game basically demands this stance from players and to never, ever enter a new location without drawn guns. Lara even starts the game with flares and a shotgun in addition to her pistols and health kits.
• Protect This House: The final level takes place in Croft Manor, invaded by the remaining Fiamma Nera forces. Mostly famous for having Lara fight in a skimpy bathrobe.
• Reaction Shot: When Marco claims the Dagger of Xian and stabs himself in the heart, the camera cuts to Lara holding her hands over her mouth and gasping at the sight of what she saw.
• Red Eyes, Take Warning: First indication yetis aren't going to be friendly are their glowing red eyes.
• Reality Has No Soundtrack: Interestingly, the final boss fight is scored by nothing more than the creepy ambience from the last two levels.
• Revolvers Are Just Better: A mini-boss goon that Lara runs into a couple of times is armed with two massive six shooters, dealing out a lot of damage while taking a bunch in return.
• Rule of Cool: Let's face it, it's the most escapist of all Tomb Raiders ever made and the very reason why so many people like it. It also helps that the game is very self-aware of this. Just to list few things out of the very long list: an Italian cult/mafia started out by a stage magician in a pursuit of an Ancient Artifact, said artifact turning the user into a dragon, yetis and other cryptids, animated jade statues, locations clearly defying laws of physics, warrior monks, impossible car chases, obligatory T. rex... The list can go on and on.
• Scaled Up: The dagger of Xian turns the user into a dragon. And by use it means plunging it into your heart. The transformation takes some time to occur. Should the dagger be removed, the dragon instantly dies.
• Sequence Breaking:
  • In the second level, the exit is guarded by a cluster of mines that will explode if you touch them and they'll kill you. Normally, you have to speed towards the mines on your boat and jump out so the boat itself triggers the mines and then get a second boat to proceed with the timed puzzle that opens the exit. However, it is entirely possible to reach the exit without using a boat at all by just swimming the entire way and going below or in between the mines while bypassing the timer completely. However, this method isn't any faster or better than the normal way, but it is an interesting alternate solution to reach the exit.
  • Normally, you'd have to find and use the detonator key to blow up the side of the opera house so that you can use its rubble to climb up and reach the level's exit. By not blowing up the building, not only do you find the jade dragon statue, but you can also use some barely reachable ledges to get behind the structure and reach the exit without having to use the explosives in the first place, which saves you a few minutes.
  • In the Ice Palace, you need the Tibetan Mask to unlock a door. However, you can ignore the mask and go to the balcony next to the door, jump over it at the right angle, and simply use some ledges to climb up and reach the bridge that the door would have led to. This saves you at least one minute.
• Shipshape Shipwreck: The Maria Doria is a sunken luxury ship containing a MacGuffin, which you explore to find the Seraph over four levels. Despite having been submerged for at least thirty years, and having been torn to pieces, with some sections of the ship upside down, and others in underground caverns, much of the ship is in good enough shape to have breathable air kept within the ship's interior, sometimes with only a bit of glass between it and the ocean depths. Switches still function to open doors within the ship, and the engine room is still functional enough to keep fires burning through vents.
• Schmuck Bait: The game has quite a number of them:
  • The very first level has baits with the jade dragon statue and a magazine for the automatic pistols. Both items are in hallways where there are spiked walls closing in as soon as you enter. You can get the items and escape with minimal damage if you already know about the traps, but many first time players will trip over themselves trying to get the items and then die from the spikes.
  • 40 Fathoms' Silver Dragon sits at the end of a room in plain sight. If Lara just runs towards it, four disguised trap doors fall out below her and dump her into a gunfight with some goons. There's also no way to get back to the statue.
  • One trap in the Temple of Xian has spiked walls closing in and Lara needs to get to the end of the room to throw a switch and run like hell to escape. There's a health kit in the middle of the room to entice players, but it's almost impossible to grab it and escape since there's no time to grab the item and reach the switch without being skewered.
  • The Diving Area can trick you at the end with the tortured monk. After dispatching the gunmen, most players will go to the monk right away to help him without realizing that doing so triggers a cutscene and then ends the level. This means you'll miss out on the gold dragon statue that's in a nearby room with the monk.
• Shout-Out: The way how Lara dispatches one of the jeeps chasing her is a recreation of the famous Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior shotgun scene, with a sudden leap out of the cabin and shooting the driver at point-blank range.
• Slippery as an Eel: The Maria Doria levels feature moray eels that hide in caverns attempting to bite Lara when she gets close. There's also a gigantic black one guarding a switch in Living Quartets.
• Soft Glass: The game is all over the place on this one, as Lara can jump through closed windows no problem, but falls onto broken glass shards is instant death.
• Soft Water: Standard for a Tomb Raider game, but one particular standout is a pretty massive fall down a shaft that leads to the bridge section of the Maria Doria.
• Spikes of Doom: You encounter them right in the first level in two flavours: pit of spikes and walls of spikes closing in on you. For the modern areas like the sunken ship or the opera house, you'll encounter pits of broken glass shards that serve the same purpose as spike pits. The Temple of Xian is also full of spiky death traps. Luckily, the spike/glass pits can be rendered harmless if you just walk through them whereas running will hurt you and falling on top of them gives the obvious result.
• Stripped to the Bone: Removing the dagger of Xian from the dragon will kill it instantly, causing its body to melt away and leave behind its skeleton.
• Stuff Blowing Up: The game is very fond of explosions, be they motorboats, planes, cars, sections of the Great Wall of China... or Lara herself. The grenade launcher can make enemies blow up as well.
• Suspicious Videogame Generosity: In the Wreck of the Maria Doria, a large medipack is placed in plain sight. In the fall that follows, Lara cannot avoid losing health; how much depends on the actions of the player. Then in the final level of the wrecked ship, there's a large health kit placed right before a very long drop to a raft below. The developers placed the health kit there so that you can survive the fall and you have no other way of approaching the raft anyway. Trying to jump down without full health will kill you instantly.
• Teleporting Keycard Squad: No card and not quite teleporting but just standing on the spot with the hut key in Tibetian Highlands level, spawns a snowscooter-riding thug offscreen who enters the area shortly after and proceeds to hunt Lara down.
• This Is Gonna Suck: This game started using occasional music stingers or drones for certain areas and encounters, though not to the JumpScare-y levels that the next game would. One in particular gives off this vibe and is prominently heard when entering the valley containing the 2 t-rexes, the crumbling rooftops of the Opera House, the slippery chasm just outside the Ice Palace, and when encountering the giant spider egg sac in their nest. For reference, hear it here
• Threatening Shark: They show up in 40 Fathoms level and are one of the main reasons why it's so frightening.
• Timed Mission: In Venice, the last part of the level has Lara flipping a switch which opens a door on the other end of the area. She has to drive the boat at full throttle (and use shortcuts) to make it to the door before it closes; if it does, she has to backtrack to the switch and try again.
• Too Awesome to Use:
  • Should players ignore or not get all secrets on a regular basis, ammo for most of weapons can get really scarce.
  • Averted with dual mini Uzis. They are by far the most efficient weapon in entire game, with ammo being plentiful even without obsessively collecting secrets.
  • It is practically required to save the M16 until the last area of the game due to the jade warriors taking so many rounds to defeat and ammo being relatively scarce compared to the the other weapons.
• Tutorial Failure: A strange case where the tutorial in a sequel does a worse job at explaining Lara's moves while the first game did a better job. You won't actually learn how to perform Lara's moves until you botch a section in the obstacle course, which will lead to a lot of trial and error. This was most likely due to the developers assuming that people already played the first game and remembered the mechanics. Furthermore, there's no indication in the game that you can now invert mid-jump or underwater (at least the manual has the decency to tell you how to do these... provided you still have it).
• Tutorial Level: Lara's obstacle course on her mansion grounds, which are separate from the main game itself. The obstacle course tests your skills with running, jumping, climbing, and swimming and you can set your personal best times as well.
• Unintentionally Unwinnable: Running out of health kits can be this in some situations where you have to fight some enemies and depending on who they are, avoiding their attacks can be impossible. Another flavor comes in the form of being forced to take fall damage while progressing in the level. If your health is too low to make the drop safely and you have no supplies left to heal with, you better hope you have a save from an earlier state you can load from!
• Unique Enemy: Few bosses aside, the most obvious example are... spiders. There is just a handful of the regular ones, all in the first level and Temple of Xian. Meanwhile, there are only five giant ones, and all of them in the Temple of Xian level.
• Videogame Flamethrowers Suck: Averted for the mooks that use them against you. Being on fire will kill you in a matter of seconds unless you happen to be near a deep pool of water.
• The Villain Knows Where You Live: Being a famous archeologist is not so good when the villains can easily track your home and try to take the artifact by brute force.
• Vader Breath: A lot of the human enemies will pant and breathe heavily in their idle state. The divers also have loud breathing due to using an oxygen mask.
• Warrior Monk: The Barkhang Monks in the Barkhang Monastery level use only spears to defend themselves with, but they have a lot of health and are capable of killing Bartoli's gunmen on their own. In fact, it's usually preferable for the player to just watch the fight and either finish off any gunmen that survive or pick up the items dropped by the gunmen if the monks survive. There were also a group of monks in the backstory that actually bombed Gianni Bartoli's (Big Bad Marco Bartoli's father) luxury vessel in order to prevent the Seraph from being used so that no one would gain access to the Talion, which would have given access to the dagger itself.
• Why Don't You Just Shoot Her?: Unlike any previous or future situation, there was no real reason why the villain wouldn't just kill Lara rather than locking her up for a No-Gear Level excuse.
• You Can Barely Stand: More than justified. Ever since hitting Tibet, Lara doesn't even stop for a second to sleep or rest. And that's already assuming she caught some sleep while flying on autopilot. After that, she spends an entire day running around, then a non-stop drive to reach the Temple of Xian, then going through all the events inside. No wonder she outright passed out of exhaustion in the end.

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Tomb Raider II received a five-level Expansion Pack on PC called Tomb Raider: The Golden Mask. This time, Lara pursues the legendary Golden Mask of Tornarsuk, hidden under a Cold War-era Soviet mining complex in Alaska. These new levels are also bundled into the iOS port, accessed the same way as Unfinished Business in the Tomb Raider I iOS port.

The Golden Mask contains examples of:

• Dirty Communists: Averted, while Lara explores Cold War-era Soviet mines with walls textured with the hammer and sickle, as well as doors with giant portraits of Stalin for some reason, she actually fights A.V.A.L.A.N.C.H.E Mercenaries inside the mines as the mines have long been abandoned.
• Disney Acid Sequence: The unlockable fifth level, Nightmare in Vegas.
• Mind Screw: The mysterious Nightmare in Vegas. What exactly was going on in that hotel - one that includes Winston, bizarre, cheesy billboards, a Talion guardian locked up in a zoo, and two T. rexes on the streets?
• Misplaced Wildlife: The story takes place in Alaska, but the first level has you fending off a great white shark and snow leopards. While the snow leopards could have been brought there by the mercenaries and adapted to the snowy environment, there's no way the shark would've survived in the frigid water.
• Palette Swap:
  • Sasquatch is just a yeti model, but brown rather than white.
  • The polar bear is a reused model of the bears from the previous game, but colored white than brown.
• Soft Water: A ridiculous example in the secret fifth level, Nightmare in Vegas. Lara has to jump off the third story of a hotel and aim for a small trapdoor on the ground level that opens up just as she approaches...and dumps her in a pool of water.
• Worthless Yellow Rocks: Eventually Lara finds herself running through caverns made entirely of solid gold, as well as rivers and lakes of molten ore. At one point she comes across a literal gold volcano. She helps herself to absolutely none of it. Although it's justified in that she has no way to extract the gold, and the molten ore kills her on contact like lava. Since Lara is obviously very wealthy, she would likely have no use for taking the gold back home.

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