Shadow of the Tomb Raider

 

It's been a few years since I last played a modern Tomb Raider game, though I remember I enjoyed them more or less. It seems like all the games released after the 'reboot', Tomb Raider 2013, they all use the same engine and new tech/gameplay styles. These games being Tomb Raider 2013, Rise of the Tomb Raider, and now Shadow of the Tomb Raider. I guess its a kind of Trilogy. I know they are story heavy, cutscene heavy, cinematic high budget streamlined type games, so I knew what I was getting myself into with Shadow of the Tomb Raider.


To my disappointment, the game starts off bringing back familliar characters which I wasnt really fond of, from the previous game, which I didn't care for. This Jonah person. Whatever, I can tolerate it. And the story goes something like you're on a series of journies to find this missing ancient object that your father was trying to track down because it has mystical powers that can save or ruin the world or something...The story is really nonsensical, mystical, woo woo and supernatural, to the point of being almost incoherent and silly most of the times. But quickly what is going to be noticed is the impressive graphical fidelity and polish to the game. The graphics are frequently stunning to look at, and is probably the best part about the whole experience. The game is very narrative heavy. You can hardly often walk 50 steps without having control taken away from you, watching a cutscene or being forced to walk slowly while listening to dialogue. It kinda gets old fast, and I was often asking myself "Is there even any gameplay here?".

The game makes you select a difficulty from a handful of them, each one with its own host of features or missing elements removed for increased challenge. But as usual, I just went with the standard Normal setting.

That's because the bulk of the gameplay here goes in three sections. First you have the platforming sections, these are very linear, almost on rails segments where you have to jump and climb across specific places in the enviornment, often in very explosive cinematic sequences, to progress to the next part. The main problem I have with the gameplay during these parts is that its just not clear, or has very good indications of exactly which pieces of the enviornment you have to interact with, and which pieces are just decoration. I know there is often these little bits of white paint that show you the path, but these are inconsistent and easy to miss, and even things like certain wall textures you have to know to jump at that look almost identical to all the other non-interactable textures. This, plus the controls just being a mess, a jumbled mess of interactions and sub-interactions that often rely on eachother, without any contextual button prompts showing up reminding you of which actions are doable, just make the whole thing feel clunky and downright annoying. While the set pieces are often really visually stimulating to look at, and the idea of whats taking place is exciting, the execution of much of the platforming ends up in tedium and frustration, not because of a lack of skill ,or because it's too hard, but because the game does a poor job visually representing the interactable elements to the player. leaving much of the platforming to guesswork and trial and error. The game is very liberal with its auto-saves, however, the game is saving constantly. So when you fail, and get the very amusing death cutscenes, you usually only lose 10-30 seconds of progress, so its not as bad as it could be, but still it gets annoying pretty quickly trying to guess where to go next. And its made so much worse that the controls and general flow of the game feels so 'streamlined' and linear that it feels on rails. It almost controls like Assassin's Creed with the platforming, in the sense where the game is almost playing its self, you only need to tap one button or hold the stick forward while your character does all sorts of amazing and insane animations, but you dont really feel like "Wow, I'm doing this! I'm so good at the game!" it almost just feels like you're chaining together a string of quick-time events. Now, I know the previous games used these sorts of controls and systems, but if I recall correctly, It wasnt quite as tedious, ambiguous, or have as many cumbersome controls to deal with, so it was more tolerable and at times fun. I can't say the platforming sections were all that fun here, like I said, only in visual was it exciting, just due to the sheer extrodinary feats of mountian climbing and watching Laura do all these crazy animations , that the idea and scope of someone doing these things is thrilling, just the actual gameplay execution is seriously lacking.

The next main style of gameplay on offer here is puzzle solving. And I would guess this is one of the biggest parts of the game. Usually involving you being inside some tomb or cave, or outdoors ruin section, and needing to use your crossbow with these Rope arrows and finding these white rope posts around the enviornment to hook onto. And then using these rope arrows to move things in the enviornment or shift things around. I really , really did not enjoy the puzzles in this game. Theres one near the beginning of the game where you have to move around a bridge using these ropes, and it was just annoying to solve because you had to shoot the ropes at a certain time and then backtrack down the map and shoot more rope arrows...Fine enough, I mean this one wasnt that bad but it was a sour taste of whats to come. Later on in the game, you climb this massive tower, also involving, guess what, lots of the tedious platforming and these rope interactions. This one wasnt awful either, but a few parts just wasted my time because I missed a certain rope post I had to use. Another puzzle has you trying to destroy a door, and you need to use oil to light a fire path to the door. This one wasted my time for like 30 minutes simply because I missed a little tiny white rope post on the wall that I had to shoot at, instead I went around playing with these physics-based, what looked like jars of oil. Just stupid, small things like this, where the game totally wastes your time, not because the puzzle is too clever, or too challenging, but because theres silly, small things in the enviornment you miss unless you go through it with a fine tooth comb. To make it even more confusing, the game has a mechanic where you can click in the right stick to sort of view your objectives and highlight things in the enviornment, and the game will point you towards where you have to go next. Laura will also say out loud a hint about what you have to do. But more often than not, these hints and objectives will confuse the fuck out of you and waste your time because they point in the wrong place or mislead you. So frequently I'd press the button to view my objective for the puzzle or get a hint, and listen to the information, but it just ended up misleading me, causing massive frustration. Another puzzle later in the game has you turning wheels around to make blood flow in a particular path on the ground, and I thought I was doing it right, I understood it. But guess what? I wasted about an hour because the game glitched and she just would not turn the wheel, no matter what I tried. I eventually gave up and Googled why the fuck she wont turn the wheel, and it turns out the game is just glitchy and if you have over 60fps some puzzles will randomly break. I restarted the game and instantly completed the puzzle as she would now turn the wheel...just wow. Talk about wasting your time doing jack shit. Another puzzle later on in the game is more of this similar type of bullshit. You have to find the rope posts, move things around, except there is a barrier in the way and you cant move the object. Well I figured out , "Ok I have to break the barrier" so I went up to it, expecting the usual press X to break prompt. But it didnt show up. Ok, what the hell do I do? Well I went around and somehow progressed the puzzle one more step, and now for no logical reason if I walk up to the post I can break the barrier. What? its like the game wouldnt let her smash the wooden plank until I progressed the puzzle one more step. It just makes no sense, and is awful.

Towards the end of the game theres a few more puzzles, one involving a bunch of Christian symbols and moving lights around. I couldn't understand what the hell was expected of me here. It was something like "Move the lights to the stages of Christ" but I couldn't figure it out. I just randomly did shit until it worked. Wow, great. Oh yeah, and one other puzzle involving flowing water where I knew exactly what to do, but wasted about 30 minutes not being able to do it, because guess what, I missed a tiny little white rope post that I had to interact with in order to progress. Like finding a needle in a haystack. So again, not because the challenges are ~so clever~ but because the game fucking sucks and wastes your time and does a terrible job giving visual cues of what objects in the enviornment must be interacted with, or flatout misleads you when you view the objectives.

So suffice to say, I didn't like the platforming much, and I actually hated the puzzle solving, and it wasnt uncommon for me to almost feel in pain playing through this game. It was only mildly entertaining because the game is so story and narrative driven, it was atleast sort of amusing to watch the nonsensical story play out, watching Laura's character, or seeing what sort of rediculous Michael Bay style events will unfold next. It really felt like a 'moviegame' at times. In a sense thats a good thing, cause its a reprive form the annoying gameplay and lets me just sit back and watch some cutscenes, but in another sense like, I just want a fun game. This game wasnt very fun.

The last section of gameplay is the combat, which is almost so little its not worth mentioning. Theres maybe a handful of times in the entire game when you do combat for more than 30 seconds. At first you get attacked by a tiger and you fight him off with a bow, that lasted like maybe 60 seconds. Then it happens in a cave where you get attacked by multiple. A few times after that you go through these caves full of these weird humanoid tribal creatures that shoot bows at you or melee you and you just shoot at them with a shotgun for 5 minutes or so. Then towards the end of the game you fight some human military enemies for like 10 minutes and thats basically it. Its insane because the game has all sorts of upgrades and skills you can unlock ,for crafting items and this and that, or theres even merchants to buy new guns and unlock gun attachments, but like the combat is so few and far between , why would I even give a shit? I used the default gun loadout the entire game cause it barely mattered. I barely cared about any of the skill tree because theres nothing to use it on. It all just feels shoehorned in to make the game seem like it has more depth than it really does. You can fast travel around the map to do various different things, go around collecting lore items or 'challenge tombs' ...but like , why? Just because you're desperate for more puzzles or something? To unlock useless skill points? I didn't do a single optional thing in the game, it just seemed so useless because theres hardly any combat gameplay anyways. The combat is completely stock standard when you do it, a simple cover based shooter, you get a hitmarker when you shoot guys and some of the enemies have stronger armor that must be knocked off first. It has a few interesting mechanics like the ability to smear mud on yourself to blend in, and it tries to have an elaborate stealth system where you blend into the grass and can do quicktime buttons to get a fancy animation of taking enemies down in various fasions, even if you climb a tree you can do this Rope takedown where you shoot a rope arrow at an enemy to do an animation and basically hang them from a tree, which is kinda cool, but its a gimmick novelty more than anything. Really theres not much point to the stealth at all because the game was so easy you can just pull out the Assault Rifle that the game generously gives you with tons of bullets and just instantly mow everyone down. You can heal yourself at any time by holding Lt and crafting a med kit on the spot, and resources are plentiful I never even ran out. So yeah the combat was in a word: Trivial. But it was almost the most fun part about the game, but thats not saying much.

That's really all the game offered, these three core components in a loop, and I didn't really like any of them. I mean I guess theres a few swimming parts, which look cool, you have to find these air pockets to prevent drowning to death, but its not like it has a lot of stimulating challenge about it. The main thing I liked was just watching how the story and characters unfolded, but I mean I didn't like that either, and found it all really lame, but it was atleast kind of amusing just purely because of the insanely high production values and visual fidelity on offer.

The game ends with a really pathetic boss fight where you just dump ammo into the guys chest, do a few quicktime events, Laura gets the sacred object to save the world or whatever, everyone smiles and laughs and she goes back to her millionare mansion to gloat in her awesomeness and gets pampered by maids or something. It's really all quite stupid and eyeroll worthy. So thats Shadow of the Tomb Raider. I'm not sure why, but I do remember enjoying the previous games much more than this one. I think they just had more combat and maybe more interesting locations. I mean basically this whole game is set in some like Aztec ruins or something but its not the most exciting location, a lot of generic jungles. And I remember the 2013 Tomb Raider game having this really edgy, gritty side to it, like Dark and messed up themes, whereas this game completely lost that edge to it. So yeah it was just all around pretty big disappointment. I was just happy when it was over.

5/10

Earthfall

 

Earthfall is a budget title which is touted as a co-op 4 player shooter game, much like Left 4 Dead. I picked it up few just a few dollars on sale cause as usual I'm always willing to play some cheap shooter game, especially co-op campaign. Well it does have 3 "campaigns" but I say that lightly. The first two campaigns consists of 5 missions each, and the last campaign is a single mission. Start up the game, invite your friend to the lobby, and you're presented with a few difficulty modes. First theres the gameplay difficuly, which by default is Normal which we chose to leave it as. Next is the "Bot difficulty" at first I had no idea what to make of this. But it turns out this means that if you dont have a full human team, you get to determine how smart the AI partners should be. Weird, but OK. We left it on default as well. You can choose a character from the 4 avalible options. But none of them are appealing or have standout characteristics. It is as generic as can be. A female, an asian guy in a hoodie, token black guy, and some other nerdy guy. We started up mission one and within just 10 minutes it was like, wow, this really is just Left 4 Dead copy pasted. Right down to all the finishing touches. Like how you can see guns glow through walls, when you pick them up your character calls out ""[Gun name] "Here!". To the melee weapons, the side arms with infinite ammo, the randomly spawning primary weapons around the maps, even the damn music sounds like a dollar store version of Left 4 Dead. Thats not automatically a bad thing, I'm fully welcoming for more games in the L4D formula - but it didnt take long for the cracks to begin to show and realize how lifeless and without personality this game was.

Instead of zombies, Earthfall uses these weird monster alien mutant things...and they're just not very threatening looking, or exciting to fight against. At least with zombies its easy to make a horror vibe and scary threatening moments with creepy sound effects, and the satisfaction of using a gore system to blow them to bits. But here in Earthfall with these generic mutants theres just not much fun in fighting them. Of course you have the derivitive "special" monsters like the Tank (Beast, here) , Spitter (Cant remember what they called it here) , The jockey enemy that grabs you (Cant remember what its called here) -- pretty much every monster from L4D is recreated here, just in a way less interesting way and nowhere near as exciting to fight or easily identifiable at a glance most of the time. There is maybe one unique enemy, this blue magical floating alien thing that has shields all around it. This thing sucks. You kinda just try to shoot in between the gaps of the shields to hit hits head, then it teleports all over the place. Its a mess, I think they are creatively bankrupt. But the worst of all is the Tank. Like L4D, this game has a "Director", meaning it will randomly spawn hordes of enemies. Sometimes the mission can be very easy, mostly because tanks dont spawn, but sometimes you'll get 3 in a row making it borderline impossible. The tanks simply have too much health. You have to dump literally hundreds of bullets into it to kill it. Even if you shoot its 'weak spot'  on the back, it doesnt do much. What this means is that for most of the time playing the game, you arent able to actually use your main weapon, because you NEED to save the precious ammo in case a tank randomly decides to spawn ontop of you. The game has a decent variety of weapons, multiple different AK's, SMG's like MP% and P90, Shotguns, Sniper, all sorts of grenades, mines, napalm things, turrets chainguns flamethrowers etc...but you are basically forced to save them for when the tank or harder enemies show up, because who knows when ammo is going to show up next. The guns mostly feel OK however, like they are sort of fun to shoot and play with, but mostly the enemies arent fun to fight so it doesnt matter. You end up having to play most of the game using these shitty pea shooter pistols, spamming them nonstop. Kinda makes some medicore combat and shooting even more lackluster since you dont actually get to play with the guns on offer most of the time.

The missions consist with a very brief intro cutscene to give some context, then you get sent on a series of objectives that show up on the top left. There icons around the game world you must go to to complete these objectives, usually they arent very creative or interesting. Mostly consists of things like turning the power on, getting gas and refueling some generator, pressing a button or waiting for a door to open, using a radio for help, and a few times having to place explosives, or just surviving a few waves of enemies. Every level consists of these basic objectives without much uniquely memorable encounters. There are not really any climaxes, or crescendos in pacing and engagement, the entire experience is kind of just a steady, lukewarm excitement level. Theres not really any big epic finales or memorable standoffs. Even the last areas of the missions are forgettable and as standard as the rest.

You'll frequently come across places where you can lay down barricades, turrets, and use this gun printing machine that lets you select a gun and spawn one, if the place currently has power. I guess this is the main selling point and distinguishing feature that sets it apart from L4D? Well its not that impressive. Its really just an idea ripped straight from Call of Duty World At War, so hardly a novel concept, but more mechanics derivitive from other famous games. So what you end up doing as a gameplay loop is going to these holdout stations where you lay down a few barricades next to the gun printer (which is one of the main ways to get ammo, just spawn new guns), and infinite health stations. Then, when you finish the "survive" objective, you have to quickly get to the new objective before the game randomly decides to spawn a tank ontop of you, rinse and repeat. Luckily each mission is short, maybe 15-30 mins tops, but theres not much else to the game besides this.

On paper this might sound OK, and at times the game is mildly enjoyable. I mean, it uses Unreal Engine, which is both a blessing and a curse. Its nice because by default its hard to screw up Unreal engines base control inputs , the general good enough modern graphics, lighting, textures, models etc, the gunplay , animation handling, and general fidelity of Unreal games is usually OK - but its also a curse because these games are so damn generic usually because its so easy to create a "good enough" game since the engine handles most of it for you, if you have a creatively bankrupt developer whos having most of his job basically AI generated for him, it leaves the end result of these games without any personality or characteristics besides being souless clones of eachother.  But worse problems lay within the game than just the engine. The AI team mates are especially abysmal. We got stuck on Level 3 and could just not finish it after repeated failures. We tried bumping the AI from "Normal" to "Masterful" and could not even see a difference. All too often the AI teammates would just stare at a wall and do nothing while you're dead on the ground begging for help. Or they would charge out into a tank with no ammo and die instantly. This is some of the worst AI I've seen in recent times. There are also no checkpoints during the level, so if everyone goes down, you reset the level from the start. Which would be fine, but the terrible AI, coupled with unabalanced bullet sponge enemies, with barely any ammo, makes this a particularly frustrating experience. The pacing of the missions is all over the place. Level 3 is super difficult, because its this close quarters factory mission where you're in tiny closed off rooms, whereas basically the rest of the game is quite easy. It's just all over the place. None of the levels really follow a coherent narrative , it just feels like random maps smashed together. Hardly feels like a "campaign".

The only memorable map in the game that looks different is that one Snow map, but only because its snow and looks different is it at all memorable. All the rest are as forgettable as can be. They are servicable enough, but fairly linear and not much to them besides walk in a straight line to the next objective. Factories, sewers, city streets levels, are most of the content here.

After finishing both campaigns, there was no rewarding end cutscene or credits reel or anything. You just kind of get picked up in a helicoptor and fireworks go off for 10 seconds and thats it. Then there is a third "campaign" that consists of a single 15 minute level that was the most pointless shit I've ever seen. Why is this a thing? Why make a campaign with one single level? Were they gonna make more and just give up? Was it added in a patch many years after the game released? Who knows, the game devs don't seem like they had their heads screwed on right.

Oh, theres also a "Skill" system that....never gets used or realized. You can only see it on the main menu, and you gain perks (?) by getting an aburd amount of kills using specific weapons or doing specific things. We never cared about any of this and seemed more like it was slapped on last minute than some core integral feature of the game, again, just more pointless features made to make the game look like it has depth but it really doesn't. As if the only reason they put it in is to be able to market "Look, our game has Skills too!" - Well I'm glad the skills dont matter, cause the last thing this game needed was more generic shit rammed into it like skill trees and modern mechanics. The best thing Earthfall has going for it is that its an "oldschool" co op shooter, as in its just jump in and play, no hero's to select, no levels to gain, no weapons to upgrade or unlock. Just jump in , pickup a random weapon, and try to beat the levels. Great, that sounds fun enough. And the game does have its moments where you think, you know this isnt so bad, I like having more Left 4 Dead style games to play, this game does some things alright like the guns arent terrible and the controls feel fluid enough, the graphics are alright - just the execution of all the mechanics are so lazily done or unimaginative, the balace is all over the place, the monsters are not exciting, the story is virtually non-existent and the character dialogue/writing is cringe at best, it doesn't make for an amazing experience and at times I was almost dreading coming back to finish this game. But at least its short, and it is a co-op game you can play with a friend over a weekend or two.

5/10