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