2013’s reboot of the Tomb Raider franchise was much stronger than just about anybody would have expected. After Tomb Raider had faded into many gamers’ memories as a relic of the past, Crystal Dynamics decided to start fresh by creating an origin story for Lara Croft and rethinking many of the game’s mechanics. Borrowing liberally from the Uncharted series (which, in truth, borrowed significantly from Tomb Raider in the first place), they managed to create a very solid platformer-shooter with a more open-world feel to it. Combined with a strong arc that saw Lara grow from a scared girl with potential into an army-decimating badass, Tomb Raider really stood out from the crowd and even got “Game of the Year” consideration from a number of publications.

So if 2013’s Tomb Raider was a risky and innovative renovation of the brand, then 2015’s Rise of the Tomb Raider is the “victory lap” game. It’s still engaging, and the combat and traversal mechanics are generally solid. But it’s also a pretty safe entry into the series, with few innovations and little to truly get excited about. There’s a feeling that Crystal Dynamics created it as something of a stop-gap release while they really think about how to elevate the series in the future.

If you follow the marketing, the most significant new-and-improved element of the game was supposed to be the revised “Challenge Tombs.” These were meant to reclaim some of the environmental puzzles of series past, but personally, this feels like the marketing team grasping at straws to present something exciting about the new title. While these challenge tombs do, indeed, exist, they were also present in the 2013 game. Their appearance here is slightly more exotic, but they’re rarely larger than those in the previous game, and never any more complicated. The puzzles pale in scope and complexity to the original games, or even 2007’s terrific Tomb Raider Anniversary.

Having actually played Rise of the Tomb Raider, the biggest difference from its predecessor is an attempt at a more open world and the inclusion of side quests. However, even this element is relatively half-assed, and almost entirely relegated to two regions of the map. Nearby villagers can give you a handful of missions, but they’re not particularly interesting, asking you to shoot or interact with a couple objects placed throughout a map. It’s more likely that the developers wanted to embrace a more open world, but were simply unable to fully integrate it within the game’s two year development cycle.

Also problematic: because the two “open” regions involve more secret locations and more complex systems of traversal (having to account for the player approaching goals from numerous paths and angles), it’s a lot buggier, too. I’ve ended up in places the game didn’t expect, leading to plenty of invisible walls and insta-death platforms. Other strange glitches include a collectible box that, due to an untimely death, now floats in the air and is completely inaccessible. Aside from that last one, which prevents me from 100%’ing the game, these bugs aren’t generally game-breaking, but they are irritating problems that weren’t present in 2013 and could have probably been squashed with a more extensive QA phase.

The story, too, is a bit of a disappointment. It brings in Lara’s father as a major player in the mythology and invents a new series-villain in the organization Trinity, but the arc at the center of the game involving Lara’s intentions toward the “Divine Source” is not only inevitable, but completely unearned. It involves a few twists, some clever, some obvious, but generally plays out how you’d expect it to. There is far less to illuminate Lara’s character than was present in the previous game.

Again, it’s not all bad. I actually really enjoyed my time with Rise of the Tomb Raider. Just getting around and fighting is a lot of fun, and they introduced a neat item crafting system into the game that allows Lara to turn grabbable objects like tin cans and glass bottles into explosive devices. The stealth is a bit underutilized, and the game doesn’t seem to expect the player to actually go through with it (numerous radio transmissions mentioned guards that I had killed who, in actuality, I had just sneaked past), but it’s still neat that several scenarios have multiple approaches. It’s all a bit too easy on the “normal” difficulty, but I never felt like putting the game down.

It’s also worth noting that, in a medium which often fails miserably with female characters, Rise of the Tomb Raider is a true standout. Unlike the Lara Croft of the original series, who was largely a blank-slate British woman known for having comically large breasts, the revamped Lara Croft continues to be a strong but multi-faceted character. She’s smart, she’s headstrong, and she’s not always right, but generally well-meaning. Her character design is great, too, still attractive but realistically so, and costumed in a practical way that is more appropriate for mountaineering in Siberia than modeling for a calendar shoot. Presenting a heroic woman in this manner seems so obvious, yet it is a constant challenge in game design.

So it’s not that Rise of the Tomb Raider is a bad game. It’s flawed but fun, mostly just disappointing in its lack of ambition. Given all that they did to revive the franchise in their last outing, Crystal Dynamics deserves a bit of a pass this time around. But if they play it this safe with the inevitable follow-up, we may see Lara Croft fade into obsolescence yet again.