Shadow of the Tomb Raider is the third and final game in the reboot trilogy. It was not primarily developed by Crystal Dynamics this time, who was the developer of the first two games. This is noticeable as there was a conscious decision to dial down some of the combat and so the game focuses more on exploration and puzzles instead. This means that the game is much slower paced and if you had liked the more action heavy elements of the previous two games, this is not a great change. The game still looks and mostly controls fine.
You play as Lara, who continues to explore and find ancient ruins. At the same time, she is attempting to foil Trinity’s plans who is going around pillaging the same ruins. The game starts off with a somewhat intense and crazy set piece but then sets Lara and her partner down into Peru where she will once again start from nil. You will then have to find her equipment and survive by finding materials to craft items with. It is a bit stale the third time around but at least this elongated tutorial section doesn’t last for too long.
Lara is nimble and agile. She can run and jump with the best of them. She has a pickax to climb up walls, able to shimmy ledges, and can climb nearly everything. Her rappelling skills can come in useful and using a bow and arrow to kill enemies never gets old. During combat sections, she can sneak around undetected to land stealth kills. Alternatively, you can go in guns blazing but usually this will just lead you to be overwhelmed. A neat aspect of the game is how customizable the difficulty can be, there are a lot of accessibility options.
Puzzles are generally not too hard. The game is linear, usually with one path to go forward in. You might find the odd larger area or two where you can find a few extra things, including challenge tombs. This straightforwardness goes for the puzzles too, as they are usually self-explanatory, even if some of them rely on timing a bit too much. Combat difficulty is separate from puzzle difficulty and the game can make puzzles easier on lower difficulties by having Lara spell out the solution.
That isn’t to say that all the puzzles are good. There is an overreliance on similar types of gimmicks that make it repetitive. Having to platforming based on timing sucks. While the timing isn’t particularly tight, it is tight enough to be annoying. The path not being that clear so that you end up dying because you went to where you are not supposed to go to is not great either. Coupled with the forced slow walks, crawls and shimmying, the game is too slow paced in many sections, feeling overly restrictive.
Swimming was touted to be revamped in this game. Lara can swim underwater for longer, so what do the developers do? They take many opportunities to “showcase” this. However, underwater swimming is never done in a fun way in games, and it isn’t much fun here either. It’s restrictive, it’s slow, and it’s annoying. There are air pockets that you need to continually get to in order to keep staying underwater, while there are many underwater enemies that you need to avoid.
The story has the same trappings as the first Uncharted game. After Lara finds a hidden entrance to get into a secret area that had been hidden for so long, she progresses forward only to find… Trinity already up ahead bombing the place. So why did we spend all that time solving that puzzle or Lara having made such a big deal of things? Despite Lara’s dialogue being helpful clues to solve puzzles, if you wanted to explore first… she will consistently spout the same lines again and again, which can be annoying. Similarly, you end up being overly reliant on using the Focus view to highlight all the collectables in the area. You’re just constantly clicking the R3 button so that you don’t miss anything, which results in you missing out on the enjoyment of the scenery.
The controls for Lara, including the climbing and jumping, can be sloppy at times. Much more often than you would like, Lara will die because she doesn’t quite reach with her jump, or she does something that you do not expect. It doesn’t help that the design of the game has instant deaths if you did not pull off a certain action in just the right way. It’s quite annoying when this happens as it doesn’t feel like it was your fault. It doesn’t help that it can be difficult to see at times, as the game overall is too dark in caves, of which there are many.
With combat so rare, it should be fun when it does occur but unfortunately, due to the level designs, there are many combat sections where it is not fun at all. Lara is an in-between. The abilities she possesses, and from the story elements, she favors stealth. However, in levels where is stripped of all her weapons and is forced to use her basic abilities is frustrating. Then in the levels where she is forced to run and gun, it is not great as the camera follows too closely to her and it is hard to tell where the enemies are at a glance. She also dies quickly from attacks.
The story is boring and bland. It had big potential as it is the final arc in the trilogy. She caused the disaster and must find a way to stop it. Yet somehow this manages to be a dull affair where you just watch detachedly. There is supposed to be a huge character development where she finds and understands herself, but it would have been much more powerful if she hadn’t already been exploring and killing people for three games already. The ending is as you would expect, there are little surprises in the whole thing. The story takes around 15 hours to complete but it would depend on how many of the side activities that you do. There are tombs and various side missions. Those side missions can be length, but they have boring mission designs and disengaging story.
Overall, shadow of the Tomb Raider is a disappointing finale to the trilogy. The original 2013 reboot was fantastic, and Rise of the Tomb Raider was also very fun. Somehow along the way, this third game managed to stuff enough things up to make it grow stale. From the control frustrations to the game design frustrations. The game has too many things that annoy you, accumulating to the point where you just want to get it over and done with so that you can move on. It’s not a horrible game but it is one where something is off about it, and it could have been a whole lot better.
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