Lara Croft and the Temple of Osiris is a game about trusting and bargaining with your friends. It’s probably not meant to be, but let’s face it, when it comes to co-op games, it’s never really co-op.

When you’re carefully tight-rope walking over a bottomless chasm and said rope is being held in place by your companion, you instantly remember all the times you “accidentally” pulled those levers whilst they just happened to be walking over that particular trapdoor. You might find yourself pleading for them not to let go and that you promise you’ll never do something similar to them again.

Temple of Osiris is of course more than an opportunity to be responsible for the accidental demise of all your friends. Aping classic adventure serials, with Lara Croft definitely studying at the Indiana Jones school of “shoot the place up” archaeology, Lara Croft and the Temple of Osiris follows this pattern by allowing you and your friends to cover ancient Egyptian ruins in storms of bullets and magical energy whilst you try and scoop up as many precious gems that aren’t nailed down. It’s your standard classic episode of Time Team.

Lara Croft and The Temple of Osiris is an Isometric puzzle and action adventure game with an emphasis on cooperation between two players. The upgrade from its predecessor, Lara Croft and The Guardian of Light, is that this time round you can have four players along for the ride. Abilities that one set of characters have will be required by the other to progress and vica versa, making communication and working together core to the gameplay.

Transforming the Tomb Raider experience into a top down isometric environment and wresting camera controls away from the player is actually very liberating and a canny move in a four-player couch co-op focused game. It essentially becomes a very beginner friendly title, so therefore perfect as a way you can play a game with a less gaming-literate friend.

Lara Croft joins another archaeologist rival as well as the Egyptian gods Isis and Horus in a quest to dispel a curse, rebuild the shattered statue of Osiris and foil underworld god Set’s apocalyptic plans. It’s an unusual team-up and the characters are all surprisingly flat and mute throughout the game. The only memorable character moment I recall was when my sister-in-law hiccuped over her headset during a cutscene, causing me to think that Isis was suffering from gastric distress.

The archaeologists have grappling ropes while the deities have magical spears that raise platforms and form shields. These form the basis of pretty much all of the puzzles that you need to get through in order to progress. As for the quality of these puzzles, they are a bit of a mixed bag, but where they excel is when they are happening at speed.

For every slightly awkward ball-and-switch maneuvering challenge, there will be a far more compelling rolling boulder or disappearing walkway lighting a fire under you to work out a way to open up a door. If you ever wanted to put yourself through the classic scenario of the walls closing in with no escape, this could be an excellent game for you in some places.

Alongside the character powers, everyone also has a set of proximity bombs that you can lay on the floor which can be immensely fun because of the fact that they can injure your team mates as well as the enemy.

Bombs actually become the way you communicate with the rest of your team if you happen to be playing remotely without headsets. If you want someone to move from a pressure-switch they’re standing on, you can tell them politely by placing a mine next to their feet.

The action can get a bit too hectic. Shooting and backing into a corner can find you quickly overwhelmed and whilst battling encroaching hordes of scarab beetles can be intense and exhilarating the first time, it quickly gets old when you recognise its patterns and when it’s going to happen again. The hectic action is at least mitigated by infinite lives, which were probably also specified as a necessity with the sometimes awkward jumps and aforementioned trust issues you are required to navigate.

Lara Croft and the Temple of Osiris is fairly short. It is entirely plausible that you can blast through this in a couple of sessions, but if it were any longer it could easily outstay its welcome. There’s still plenty to do and the environments are surprisingly varied considering you are in a desert-based tomb complex. There are also plenty of things for 100% completionists, but they don’t tend to be overly interesting challenges. Someone might very well want to go through the level and light every single brazier doodad that looks a bit like the background or push themselves to finish the area in under a minute, but we took one look at the list and decided it wasn’t for us.

When we played this through, we did find a couple of interesting glitches and some of the puzzles are head-scratchers for the wrong reasons. There was one puzzle with a turntable and some crocodile-man creatures that I’m still not sure how we completed and I do suspect the game actually just felt sorry for us and pretended we’d done the right thing. There’s also a certain amount of chaos that you invite in the more fiddly machine-related puzzles when you have three bouncy friends in tow trying to “help”.

Lara Croft and the Temple of Osiris review verdict: Is this your next favourite co-op game?

Lara Croft and the Temple of Osiris is an enjoyable and relatively inexpensive title. Most notably, it is one of a relatively small number of legitimately enjoyable couch co-op games available out there. Whilst not spectacular, it will keep you and three friends happy for a handful of evenings and will only be made more fun with the right group. Don’t expect this to be your favourite game of all time, but you might build a couple of fun experiences with some pals.

Lara Craft and the Temple of Osiris is available on the Playstation 4, Xbox One and PC.