Do you have too much happiness in your life? Are you tired of uplifting adventure? Then have we got the game for you! Shadow of the Tomb Raider delivers non-stop frowning, pouting, and despair mixed with a whole heap of incoherent storytelling! Oh, and there’s a totally lame season pass! Act now and you too can witness Lara Croft go from gaming legend to insufferable whiner! Awesome, right!?
How’s that for a review introduction? Now that you already know things aren’t going to be very positive, let me summarize my feelings. Shadow is a technically competent game with fairly solid gameplay ruined by ineffective writing, dreadful storytelling, and a very unlikeable protagonist.
Lest you think I’m some sort of hater, let me emphatically say I loved the first two games and was so hoping this game would bridge the gap between the young, apprehensive reboot Lara and the confident, witty Lara of the 1990s. Rather, we end the trilogy with a truly lamentable Lara and a very mediocre mess of a game.
A Different Developer
How did Shadow turn out so badly? The answer requires delving into the development details. The 2013 reboot, Tomb Raider, and 2015 sequel, Rise of the Tomb Raider, were both made by the very talented Crystal Dynamics. Then for some crazy reason, Square Enix handed over this beloved franchise to Eidos Montréal.
As a natural result, Shadow feels out of place and inconsistent. It fails to build upon the strong improvements of the critically acclaimed second game and feels like a lesser developer made a big jumble of everything…because they did.
Not only is the overall pacing and platforming inferior, the story and characters are unfocused. What should have been Lara’s triumphant time to shine turns into a muddled mess…a (forgive the pun) shadow of the prior Tomb Raiders.
“Clean behind your ears or I’ll cook them up for supper.”
– A native mother parenting…maybe she’s kidding?
The bottomline: the game is very playable but uninspired. Buy it for very cheap because it feels like a cheap imitation of the truly creative and inspiring first two games.
Now that you know my feelings, let me prove my case to you, starting with the good things.
Gorgeous Visuals! So Pretty!
By far the best thing about Shadow is the visuals. This game is stunning, the pinnacle of years and years of technological progress. The lush jungles. The realistically swaying foliage. The sparkly riverbeds. The finely detailed stonework and carpentry. Everything is so expertly crafted! The artists have done a truly brilliant job creating one of the most gloriously attractive adventure games!
More could be said on the truly outstanding visuals (Lara’s silky hair!), but you get the point. The game is a sight to behold!
Photographer Mode Mayhem!
Given that Shadow’s visuals are phenomenal, I absolutely loved using the photo mode to take a bunch of really quirky and interesting captures. Since the actual story is such a downer, it’s pretty hilarious how you can put a funny smile on Lara in the most absurd situations.
I honestly think using the photo mode was the most enjoyable part of the entire game…which is probably yet another indication the game isn’t up to par…but look at my fantastic photos!
Nice Exploration, Rewarding Adventuring
World design allows for a positive sense of discovery. Although there are linear paths for progressing the story, the inter-connected zones are large enough to feel impressive and believable but never overwhelming. So this is good.
Further enhancing exploration, just like the prior two games, each location can be returned to via Fast Travel to fully explore and locate all the fun treasures and goodies. There’s a satisfaction to be had knowing you’ve 100% cleared an area, having fully mastered the jungles and caverns and so on.
The same fundamentally strong gameplay loop of the first two games still exists: story setup, locating a camp, exploring a small area, and reaching your goal. Shadow is strongest when it lets you explore and play and discover on your own.
Detailed Town Hubs
There are a couple major towns that act as hubs for most of your adventure. These locations are extremely detailed, full of NPCs buying, selling, cooking, and doing other daily tasks. As alive as the locations feel, they basically act as a means to access merchants and side-quests.
Paradoxically, the attention to detail in these mostly non-interactive areas is actually a symptom of Shadow’s misguided development. The game is much shorter than the prior two games, and I’d rather have had several more playable areas than a bunch of highly accurate NPC farming and fishing routines. Bizarre priorities.
Tombs and Raiding Thereof
Proper tomb raiding is still semi-infrequent. There’s nine tombs, although I explored less than half because I just didn’t find them as engaging as the prior two games.
The puzzles and platforming seem less creative and clever but good enough I suppose. Like the second game, the reward for raiding a tomb is a skill unlock, which is nice.
Customization & PC Port
The game provides excellent options to customize your play experience. Separate difficulty options for combat, exploration, and puzzles is welcome. An option to simply hold the key down instead of mashing it to pry things open is extremely blessed for those of us who despise the totally obnoxious button mashing events.
Graphically, the game allows excellent customization of visual quality, scaling well with various hardware. Options to turn off Depth of Field, Motion Blur, and other often disliked visual effects are welcome.
The game runs well on PC (after a few early patches). There are very brief engine hitches when transitioning areas, but otherwise this is a very solid PC port with excellent keyboard and mouse support and good performance for most. See our original PC Performance Analysis article for more information.
I only encountered a few bugs and issues, to the game’s credit. My favorite bug was a man NPC talking with a woman’s voice.
The Lush Listening Experience
One must give massive kudos to the dazzling sound design. From the creaking boards to the crisp crumbling of cavern rocks and the many ferocious sounds of nature, Shadow is an immersive aural delight.
As you scale rock walls, impactful clinks and jostling boots sounds fill the sound stage. Breaking open crates has such a satisfying crunch. Delicious!
The voice acting itself is superb, as expected from a title of this budget. There’s an option to listen to dialogue in the native languages, which is nice for those seeking more immersion and who don’t mind subtitles.
“I like this world…
It’s not perfect, but everything I love now is in it.” – Jonah
The musical score is adequate but unremarkable. Hence, I will remark no further on it!
Quality Motion Capture and Acting
Shadow’s story is presented with very competent and well-directed cutscenes, just like the first two games. Full motion capture allows for excellent lip syncing and a level of believability that puts you right into the action. It’s clear this is a triple-A, big-budget game.
Unfortunately, despite the presentation being so good, what is actually presented is pretty poor. It feels like such a waste to spend so much effort telling such a limp story, which brings us to the game’s many failings.
Lara’s Unfortunate Personality
Lara has been rightly criticized in the prior two games for lacking a positive personality. She rarely if ever smiled, cracked a joke, or even laughed at the madness or her adventures. As such, she really needed to lighten up and become a bit self-aware.
Lara saw a psychologist at the start of the second game, so I was hoping she would be more balanced this time around. Presumably this third game would continue maturing Lara to get her to overcome her dour ways. This is not the case.
“The sun is dying. Soon the world will be erased.”
– Some positivity to brighten your day.
The new developers have tried to expand Lara’s personality. She’ll bust out a smile and laugh from time to time, but it feels very forced and weird considering Shadow doubles down on Lara being a selfish, overwrought jerk.
There are some flashback segments, with beautiful visuals and touching moments, but these sections feel very inconsistent given the harsh tone of the rest of the game. It’s like they wanted follow the brilliant Uncharted 4, which handles flashbacks fantastically, but didn’t have a clue how to actually show Lara developing into the person she is today.
The overall writing of Lara’s character just feels confused. They brought in a new writer for this game, a woman who helped write Assassin’s Creed Liberation and Black Flag. Oddly enough, both those games feature vastly superior writing, so something went very wrong during this game’s development.
“I could have had a family.
Everything could have been different.” – Lara
Playing as Lara just isn’t very much fun because I don’t know why I’m rooting for her. Why should I care about her? Sure, this adventure is a grand and bombastic ride…but why do I want to go on a ride with such miserable company?
Forced Stealth and Other Sins
Halfway through, the game decides it would be fun to make you “lose” all your weapons…stop me if you’ve played this one before. Yes, the classic “we spent all this time making this stealth segment so you’ll darn well play our way!” because who doesn’t love forced melee-only stealth sections? No.
Speaking of stealth issues, you’ll be in the bushes, a prompt to melee-kill a soldier will appear, and you’ll successfully drag his body into the bushes. Except moments later soldiers will spot you for some unknown reason. This is a fail. Also there’s no blind-fire from cover, which is very aggravating. It’s like they’ve never played the Uncharted series.
I will give the game respect for attempting smarter enemy AI. If you kill an enemy and he doesn’t return to his usual patrol, enemies will know and come looking. It’s a small thing but does add realism.
Platforming Issues
Most of the jumping and platforming sections are inferior to the prior two games. I found myself unsure where to jump and often dying because of poor design and lack of polish. Lara refuses to grab ledges or land jumps if you don’t do it exactly as the developers intended. This isn’t fun.
The weaker platforming makes sense since this is Eidos Montréal’s first attempt at making a game like this, but this is why you don’t give the third game in a beloved series to a new developer!
To the game’s credit, some of Lara’s death-defying physical stunts are quite impressive. When the huge leaps and last-second grabs work, it’s a sight to behold. But it’s still roughly the same thing we’ve seen in the four Uncharted games and two prior Tomb Raider games.
The Story and Its Many Failings
The biggest problem with the story is it’s very hard to follow. I found myself constantly questioning why the next event was happening. There are all these different peoples and artifacts, with no inherent connection, and the game never bothers to try to explain much.
Lara sets off the end of the world at the start. Should we explain how? Nah, just mention the Mayans or whatever. Lara must find the one relic to save everyone. How do we know this? Who cares! Some guy’s journals from the 1600s are somehow still legible and will guide us! Why? Who knows! Just shut up and play!
“When I took the dagger…
I felt like I woke something up.” – Lara stating the obvious.
At one point the story has you put on an enemy’s outfit and mask and somehow this totally tricks the bad guys into thinking you’re one of them when talking face to face. Nevermind that you’ve got a British accent, are the only Caucasian, and are known to the whole camp as working with the other side. Talk about the power of a new set of clothes!
Shadow is one of the most tonally inconsistent games I’ve played. You go from simple treasure hunting, to end of days destruction, to sweet and innocent childhood flashbacks, to slavery and human sacrifices, to a serene church, to painting the world red with bloodthirsty murder. How about just telling us one consistent, understandable story like the prior two games!
Laughable and Confused Villains
The game also continues the story of “Trinity”, the villainous organization from the second game. However, the explanation of how Trinity connects with the events of this third game is preposterous. There’s virtually zero time spent explaining why Trinity would even be involved in these events.
“Sometimes we all need to remember what we’re fighting for.” – Lara speaks true…too bad I’m not sure what I’m fighting for.
To me it’s painfully obvious that Crystal Dynamics, the original developer of the first two games, was going to conclude the Trinity story in their third game, but Square Enix yanked the franchise from them (because of money, no doubt), and Eidos Montréal was left to come up with this wreck of a story. Very sad indeed.
Season Pass Trash
I must call out Square Enix for creating a season pass that contains no meaningful story content. You get 7 more challenge tombs (yawn) featuring cooperative play for some crazy reason. The second game’s season pass at least gave us alternate game modes and a story DLC that tied in well with the main story. Fail.
Concluding Remarks
Shadow is dreadfully serious and yet tells a ludicrous story about cults and cataclysms. Lara comes across as the biggest dolt, never seeing how absurd her own story is.
The game’s at its best when it’s pure gameplay: traversing jungles, exploring caves, and murdering bad guys. There’s fun to be had in the brief times we can play how we want, but why must we be forced along such a dubious story with such a tiresome protagonist?
If this game was the first of the series, maybe we’d say it’s a good start and hope the sequel is better. However, this is the game after the sequel!
Shadow is a huge step backwards and honestly might have permanently killed this rebooted Lara. Shame on Square Enix for treating Lara like this, and shame on them for selling us an inferior product!
A sad end to a promising tomb raider.
- Gorgeous, lush visuals
- Excellent art design
- Well-realized town hubs
- Photo mode so fun!
- Exploration is nice
- Decent gunplay & stealth
- Crisp, impactful sounds
- Very high-budget
- Lara is so dull, whiny
- Incoherent main story
- Contrived plot devices
- Ridiculous villains
- Tonal inconsistencies
- Campaign is too short
- Season pass is terrible
- Square Enix, enough said
Playtime: 22 hours total. Nick completed one playthrough in about 20 hours with a few extra hours doing some side-quests. There’s still many collectibles, side-quests, and tombs to explore, but why bother?
Computer Specs: Windows 10 64-bit computer using an Intel i7-3930k CPU, 32GB of memory, and a nVidia GTX 980 Ti graphics card.
Nick’s been a PC gamer for over 20 years, having grown up on first-person shooter games (he’s very proud of his Quake 2 tournament trophy). Nick also loves deep, engrossing role-playing games, and he’s also more famously known as Brumbek, the creator of Static Mesh Improvement Mod for Skyrim. Nick believes the essence of enjoyment is to play and ponder video games.
Contact: Email
I watched a playthrough of this on YouTube and after enjoying the 1st and 2nd games, this one was so dull. I made it about 2 hours into the playthrough and just skipped around to the forgettable ending.
Maybe the next game should be more about exploring and letting the player discover things in the world than a linear story where Lara finds things. Add in some awe and wonder to the proceedings; make it seem like Lara is genuinely stunned by the world she’s in. Add more color, make things brighter, make it a world gamers would want to play or watch for 10-12 hours. As it is now, this game is more likely to make people feel depressed.
A Lara Croft game that’s more about free exploration, cutting out the boring linear stories that no one cares about, would reinvigorate this franchise.
Dull is a very good word for this game. It’s such a waste of so much artistic talent. If only Crystal Dynamics had made the game…sigh…
Exactly. Technically it was beautiful but all that technical artistry was in service on nothing.
“Square Enix, enough said”
Damn…. it’s about time i see this statement in a review. Been saying it for a while now myself.
33 millions loss – for square enix. nuff said.
A lot of people will buy this game anyway. Looks like they’ve already paid for great reviews at some sites also.
Dont worry i am sure when they show off the new challenge tomb in some feminist even, they gonna make it all up.
They’re going to kill the franchise again, right? After Thief, Deus Ex, now this. At least Hitman managed to slip the axe.
It feels like you could’ve shortened the pros list because basically the first 2 pros and “very high budget” basically mean the same thing, or anyway something you could’ve said with one pro only, which could’ve included even “Well-realized town hubs”
Anyway square enix has ruined the saga with this reboot, i only played fully the first of these – felt kinda bad, i didn’t recognize anything of Tomb raider or Lara Croft.
I seriously hope they’ll stop defecating on this historical title, or stop with the young, retrded, and ugly Lara and with the survival, crafting stupid gameplay.
Ugly Lara ? What are you talking about ? She’s hot AF in this game.
Yeah, but you think ‘Chelsea’ Manning is “hot AF” too!
You guys must be some Greek God level of good looking nerds if Lara Croft isn’t hot enough for you lmao.
No need to cry because the ladies laugh at your P
eniS4At least I’ve had ladies look at my PeniS4 instead of me just looking at the ladies through an LCD screen, like you.
Burn!
Flashing your ‘thumbstick’ at unsuspecting ladies isn’t anything to brag about. Your beloved wall poster of Kratos and laminated photo collection of Mark Cerny must be a real ‘dual shock’ to them.
There are plenty of sony fangirls who are very much interested in my Mark Cerny laminated photos actually. https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/ef8a50baa9a77094c288c29f7fd8a38871522d8e0297840e377a262cd4d5d443.png
Ah, your Photoshopped desperate pic of Kratos once more that has him grinning like a paedophile! Somewhat disturbing given the nature of the most recent game in the ageing franchise.
Man, aside from spiderman, i did not enjoy any other sony game. Sony these days is trying to hard to be hollywood, the amount of censoring they are doing to japanese devs is ridiculus.
Sorry to hear that. I and the rest of the world enjoyed pretty much all of them, with a few exceptions. (The Order 1886)
If it wasn’t for PS4 exclusives, my top games of the year list would probably be narrowed down to a game or two.
>rest of the world enjoyed pretty much all of them
Wow, didn’t know God of Soy sold 7billion copies.
Horizon Zero Awards….also driveclub. Not to mention killzone shadowfail.
So no you talking trash, sony doenst produce the exclusives they used to.
Horizon was nominated for game of the year by literally everyone. If Zelda didn’t come out that year, it would’ve been GOTY. It still was for many other outlets, just not at the game awards show.
Ironically Greeks are not pretty, Mediterraneans in general, rough faces, big ugly eyes and too hairy. Id argue north europeans are the prettiest.
Thank you for that racist lil’ nugget of info.
“racist”
SOOOOOO Greeks are not white?
HEEEEYY!
Googled it, Damn you, HE does not look good.
Havent you know Bub&bob and Oxidized are gay couple? Well now you know why they dont like women.
I’m glad you like rtrded face girls
wtf are you talking about? She looks like the most generic looking person ever. At least in the first game she was kinda cute.
Cons : Square Enix, enough said
NICK MCCASKEY https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/397a7f1cf669136da80facd8c4770298187a8d620c4667b1432db986d21e8f60.jpg
You put more effor in this review then square in the game
Yep! Excellent review Nick!
Best comment !
Well, I guess they picked the right name for this game. It is a shadow of what Tomb Raider games used to be. I just had a quick look and IGN gave the game a 9 out of 10 and PC Gamer gave it a 84 out of a 100. What a joke those sites are. I hope you do get offered a full time reviewer job Nick but not at either of those sites.
I will probably get the game when it’s $10.
Those disreputable sites likely wouldn’t employ such an honest reviewer. He’d likely be blacklisted by the so-called AAA publishers for daring to maintain integrity.
On a semi-related note, check out Worth A Buy’s video review of Battlefield V. Hilarious as always!
> I will probably get the game when it’s $10.
It’s a guaranteed $5 bin candidate for me.
Each time I read one of these reviews about how Rise or Shadow are uninspired generic AAA tripe with a terrible story and a terrible Lara, I can’t help but wonder why they didn’t think the same about the TR2013, because that’s exactly what that game felt like to me and the sequels have just been more of the same.
Hopefully this means more people are waking up to the generic high-budget crap that this series has been since the reboot and are just trying to rationalize it by convincing themselves that the first game was better.
Rise of the tomb raider was interesting, it had a nice theme, but i agree about the first game.
Agreed. Rise was a genuinely fun game for me. It improved upon TR2013 so much! Sadly, many people skipped it because of that idiotic XBox exclusive-deal, pushing the PC release back several months.
and the x360 version meant that they had to make the game to run on it, which meant they had to use an old engine and instead of adding new graphics features they past them on top of the old ones, like mafia 3, so it was an unoptimized mess.
TR2013 had many issues, I agree (quick-time events!). The reason I enjoyed it was because it was fresh back then. Sure, it copied Uncharted’s gameplay, but it had a great setting, great visuals, and showed a lot of promise.
2015’s Rise actually gave us a creative and interesting game, in my opinion. I’ve played it as recently as two months ago, so it’s not nostalgia. Rise had very cool environments, excellent pacing, and clever puzzles. And I enjoyed the story because it was fun.
2018’s Shadow…well…you read my review. It’s way worse than the prior two games. I hope this helps explain why I respect the first two games so much more.
Let’s hope this is the last time we see this iteration of Lara Croft. I want the bold, confident, adventurous and big-titted one back.
What ??! How dare you ?!
You also want temples, tombs and exploration while you’re at it?? 😉
WITH DUAL PISTOLS AND JUMPING UP IN THE AIR SIDEWAYS
Ironic isn’t it they they made Tomb Raider more based on narrative yet the narrative is terrible.
No! she should be an overweight transsexual, and it goes without saying a POC. She/xer should also be disabled, but it’ll be cool because the temples will have ramps for the differently-abled.
From what i heard before this game released, there will be more tomb raider games but they wont feature this lara and this kind of gameplay …GOOD.
But seriously though HOW FREAKING HARD IS IT, to make a indie game with low poly graphics that you explore dangerous dungeons with traps in them that you need to find keys to progress?
Well they made sure to NPC/SJW th title to death. Most main characters are amazing females ( and good/wise ones, even the bad one really isn’t ) to a point you can’t pretend to ingore it. The top mechanic in macho South America is a hot chiquita of course.
The game is filled with all the talent such a PC dev team can create… which is an empty shell of nothingness…
But most of all, the game sucks. It is really bad. It suffers from the Left’s syndrom: constantly interupting the very little fun you could have with boring cutscenes as if it were virtue signaling. The fake open world is filled with boring and un-interesting quests that make looking for your grandpa’s chicken like a night a the opera…
Congratulations Eidos Montreal! May you follow the steps of your sisterhood at Bioware Montreal. Of course, it is always Montreal 🙂
Bioware Montreal…didn’t they make that sh*t stain of a game, Andromeda?
Indeed. It’s almost as if there were some kind of trend… like.. get woke… go… ?
What, you mean to tell me that you are not “immersed” when Lara freaking comments about everything around here, making pointless meaningless comments about menial stuff around her?
That’s probably me… I’m not educated enough nor am I worthy enough… 🙂
I hate this design style, constantly interrupting you when you try to play but its even worse when you find out that outside of those interruptions the base gameplay is lara looting stuff in the jungle, its so boring.
WHY OH WHY GAMES DONT SELL?
Because you suck at making games.
Indeed. I felt like someone was pulling me back from behind with every useless cutscene. When you have nothing to say, just let the player play. It’s a damn game, not a movie…
An inadvertently frank expression of the reviewer’s sympathies for anybody buying this game, perhaps!
Ha, love it! Great comment! This one is definitely a bad buy! Unless you hate life.
Very good graphics and beautiful locations, extremely fun amd rewarding shoothing mechanics on gamepad, exploration, weapons crafting. All three tomb raider games are much better games overall compared to lets say uncharted series.
biggest problem with new tomb raider is because of direct involvement of religious fanatic anita sarkeesian and rhianna pratchett. they butchered the franchise for pushing their own agenda.
you know what? Id take sjw stuff in the game, if that meant that the gameplay was like the old games with traps and puzzles and underwater sections and monsters. I would just skip the cut scenes. But sadly there is none of that either. They just barely added underwater stuff in this game.
LOL. Even when she’s smiling, her eyes are sad.
One hell of a good review. I love it.
Thanks much my friend!
waiting for protection to be cracked
Maybe they do a good portion of diversity hires for the writing teams because that’s where they can kind of get away with it. You can’t skimp on the talent when it comes to creating the gameplay/sound/visuals, but the writing can take a hit for the sake of inclusivity.
What’s sad is the writer of the first two games was Rhianna Pratchett, a truly talented writer! Her father was an amazing writer and she’s continued that tradition. However, the new writers for this third game…maybe they were brought in last minute and couldn’t get the creative freedom to write a good story? We’ll probably never know.
Rhianna Pratchett interview from 3 years ago,
“There’s part of me that would’ve loved to make Lara gay.”
BECAUSE YOU KNOW, THATS IMPORTANT WHEN YOU ARE TOMB RAIDING, BECAUSE YOU KNOW IN THE FIRST 7 GAMES SHE TREATS MEN LIKE FOOLS OR TARGET PRACTICE, SO ANYONE WOULD ASSUME THAT SHE IS A LESB…anyway point is why does some fictional’s character bedroom decisions matter in an action game?
Womb Raider?!
I presume this was the last title in this franchise to feature LARA’s adventures and story, or can we expect more TR games to come in near future as well ?
I will repost what i said above
From what i heard before this game released, there will be more tomb raider games but they wont feature this lara and this kind of gameplay …GOOD.
But seriously though HOW FREAKING HARD IS IT, to make a indie game with low poly graphics that you explore dangerous dungeons with traps in them that you need to find keys to progress?
“If this game was the first of the series, maybe we’d say it’s a good start and hope the sequel is better. However, this is the game after the sequel!”
YES, everything feels inferior, the environments are less varied, the weapons are crappier, most of the time you dont do anything significant, the action pieces are inferior, the last part of the game is a joke, too short campaign. It feels like this was somethig like the third transformers game, outsourced to a small crappy studio instead of the real devs and the game was a mere shell of its former self. The only good thing are the traps and underwater sections but it took so many years to barely scratch the surface of what the first game offered back in what? 1996?
Thanks for the honest review, @NICK. Very well put. Recommended for sure.
Hats off ! ?
Ha, good catch! Proof reading your own work is always the least effective way to catch errors because you naturally see what you intended to say rather than the actual words. So good work catching this one!
Lara has been made confused by modern day ideologies, strong female feminists can’t be a traditional mother role with a family because their ideology doesn’t agree with it and wants to destroy it and you see it in more and more games now. Tomb Raider(if you can even call it that) has lost me.
Good review. Disagree about the platforming issues you had, I thought they there as good as, if not better than the last ones. Didn’t even try the photo mode… why is that fun again? The story was, yes, kind of a downer, and very disjointed considering the locations and limited variation in scenery. I didn’t like how things slowed down once you got to the Hidden City… there was SO many POI’s and collectables, I felt like getting all of them was a mandate – which again derailed the story, for me at least.
The ending was typical Hollywood style.. Yea. Kind of felt odd, especially considering this was the end of the trilogy. Out with a whimper. Ultimately, I’m glad I played it, because I like when I get bang for my AAA buck graphically and design wise. But this was way too short and, as I told a few people, underwhelming.
You mean women that look like average women you would see in every day life ? Nobody thinks they have to look like perfect super models except for virgins who want to furiously beat their meat to video game characters.
FACEPALM….hey lets do a game about superheroes, lets make everyone look mundane and normal, we have those amazing graphics we can do amazing things with that tech, lets use them to portray dirty muddy back allies and ugly people.
You know videogame stuff, not hating them or anything….or gamers
I wonder if this series is going to quietly disappear the way Deus Ex, seems to have done.
Loved the game and Lara in it. With the world ending, there was not much to laugh about so a few smile and jokes seemed like a fair amount. My only gripe is the DLC – it’s coming out after i finished the game and then I’ve moved on to something else. Would have loved more challenge tombs as part of the main game as they were great but too few.
If you best like other types of games, or games with another tone / humor / speed then obviously this will not be the best for you. But it is not a bad game, just because your preferences are different.
I’m glad you loved it. I will have to disagree on the writing quality and story progression. I found the actual writing and sequence of events very poor and disjointed.
But I do agree the game can be fun. If you never question the story, you do enjoy it more. But if you diagram the story…you find it’s a big mess. That’s my opinion, anyway!
I do see your point about the story. However, once we got past the silliness of Lara inadvertently dooming the world (sigh) the rest of the story (saving the world) was pretty well done, and for once I liked both the protagonist and pretty much all major NPCs.
The detail that went into Lara herself – both voice acting and graphics/animations was amazing. I’ve not felt a character being so “real” in a long time For me, this meant a great deal for the ‘immersion’ into the game.
Compared to FarCry5 (i’m a fan of both series) this game was infinity better IMHO. Also the history aspect.
I’m really glad you liked it! I think the game will grow on me as well since now I can play it without the reviewer perspective. I agree the detail for Lara is amazing. This is a top-notch production for sure!
Did you play Rise of the Tomb Raider? I miss the storytelling and connected world of that game…
Yes, played both previous games. I actually started again on the first yesterday. Will give it a few hours and see if I can get into it (and Rise) again.
I don’t get it. Wasn’t this game released in september? Why review it two months later?
Because I took so long preparing the review! Plus, big Autumn sales coming up shortly, now’s a common time people buy Sept/Oct/Nov releases.
All right, makes sense. Thank you.