Shadow of the Tomb Raider | Review | PC
Developer: Eidos Montreal
Publisher: Square-Enix
Platforms: PS4, Xbox One, PC (Review Platform)
Well, Rise of the Tomb Raider was awful but what do we have here, Shadow of the Tomb Raider is developed by Eidos Montreal, the studio that brought us the excellent Deus Ex: Human Revolution & Mankind Divided. Surely they played Rise of the Tomb Raider, laughed their arses off at its ludicrously easy combat difficulty, its barely developed characters & its complete lack of meaningful improvement over the 2013 Tomb Raider reboot, & simply proceeded to make their own Tomb Raider game...but then Square Enix stopped them & said “No! That will cost too much money.”
So here we are again, starting off with one of those flash-forwards that were trendy about 10 years ago, featuring a plane that's about to crash. A bad way to start a Tomb Raider game whichever way you look at it but mainly because, rather than showing or teasing the audience about the plot & beginning to build up the desperately underdeveloped Jonah to match his promising start in Tomb Raider 2013, we get a lot of shouting, noise & debris flying everywhere. Guys, we literally had a whole game that was just those things like 2 years ago & we all know that both Lara & Jonah are going to be completely fine when this thing smashes into the ground at 1000mph.
After this we flash back for another short scene with no substance but plenty of quick-time events in case you were out of practice with those. Then Jonah finally exclaims that he knows a good bar nearby (and thank Quetzalcoatl because I could do with a drink!) In all honesty, once the game calms itself a little, the player is treated to a nice slice of explanatory dialogue catching us up about our heroes’ adventures since tasting the divine sauce. They are hot on the heels of the mercenary group Trinity & have even taken down a few cells on their travels. Lara & Jonah have been using Richard Croft's notebook to track an artifact down in Mexico which Trinity also seems to be extremely interested in.
The following section of the game sees Lara slinking through streets in a masquerade mask with the goal of infiltrating a nearby dig site & it's effective both in setting the mood for the rest of the game and in quickly getting the player back to grips with the controls which are of course completely unchanged from Rise of the Tomb Raider.
A word of warning for those intending on playing on the hardest difficulty, the game only saves when you use a campfire & the only one in this hour-long prologue is near the end so you'd better hope the game magnetises you to every ledge sufficiently otherwise you're practically back to the beginning with a whole load of climbing to re-do. This is a real shame because although I love the idea of a hardcore playthrough where resources have to be used to light the campfires, this mode was clearly tacked on as an afterthought because they didn't make the effort to balance the game properly around this mode.
Despite the initial frustrations, this prologue as a whole is one of the strongest parts of the game. Starting off slow but then ramping it up to one of the most intense moments we've had in this new trilogy. We even get clear character development from both Lara & Jonah delivering what seemed to have been promised from the off. After a natural disaster Lara believes was her fault she is now hel bent on preventing Trinity from making things worse. Jonah on the other hand wants to help who he can right then & there, & accuses Lara of being narcissistic.
It's a powerful moment, yet fleeting because for the rest of the game it's just…never really brought up again. Jonah immediately goes back to being utterly useless & inconsequential to the plot. His catchphrase in this game is “I'll find another way around.” Yes, despite Lara having to crawl through deathtrap infested caves & over sheer cliffs, Jonah always manages to simply show up for a chat at the other side. Lara even discovers an inhabited Mayan city, untouched by the outside world, by climbing up and through a mountain only for subsequent trips to be taken via a short boat trip up the river from a modern settlement. Also, everyone speaks English & unlike prior badass depictions of Lara, she doesn’t even attempt to speak any other languages despite the returning mechanic of gradually learning languages by reading monuments. I never understood this mechanic as it’s not very realistic (once again despite marketing) and would have been better delivered as before, by showing Lara researching intently before an expedition, utilising her gigantic library.
Yet more to say about Jonah: I think Eidos Montreal might have realised the effectiveness of having supporting characters speak to Lara through her earpiece as she delves into tombs ala Tomb Raider: Legend. Zip & Alistair’s banter was always enjoyable. Their role as informational & moral support for Lara was perfectly executed. As smart as Lara is, it helps to have someone who can instantly check up on things in the library at home. Their attempt to make Jonah fill this role however is so mind-numbingly dull & even nonsensical at times that I think this must have been another rushed afterthought for the team. Take an early example of Jonah calling Lara to tell her he sees Trinity doing “something” & will get closer to see...nothing comes of this conversation. Then later, despite Jonah having no way of knowing where exactly Lara is in relation to Trinity who are both deep underground, he frantically tells Lara that Trinity are closing in on her. Utter nonsense.
Lara’s new skills were a big focal point in Square Enix’s marketing for Shadow of the Tomb Raider. How amazing is it that she can now wall run? Well, not very as that feature was in the Legend trilogy & could be done in multiple ways. In Shadow of the Tomb Raider, there’s only one way you can go into a wall run: by rappelling down from a ledge first. It’s the same every single time & it gets old fast just like climbing in general which is just as linear as it has ever been. Other skills are unlocked via the incredibly ugly & convoluted skill tree which attempts to convey which skills have been unlocked, which are available & which you don’t have the experience for through an arbitrary jumble of garish colour, white & grey. If you have the pre-order DLC for the game you can safely ignore a lot of these which make resources easier to find as, like most bad DLC, it just gives you stuff you might have otherwise had to play the game to get. Then there’s something like ‘Death From Above’ for example which allows Lara to tie up enemies in trees. The problem with this is that these are very specific branches that I found 2 of in the entire game 1 of which wasn’t really viable to use due to it being in view of pretty much all the enemies in the area.
What Shadow of the Tomb Raider needed (& what Rise of the Tomb Raider was lacking too) was a bigger focus on the viability of stealth & an expansion of player choice that this should bring. Whilst Eidos Montreal did certainly attempt to make stealth a bigger part of the game in terms of mechanics such as using mud puddles to cover Lara, allowing her to hide against vine walls or make yourself invisible to infrared goggles. The problem arises when you realise that the level design simply isn’t tailored around player choice or even around the stealth opportunities that the game is seemingly trying to open up for you. The most satisfying moments of stealth are ones that are part of an extremely linear set path the levels are pushing you in to. The rest feel like hiding spots are plonked down at random in what is still a fairly limited space which will more often than not result in enemy patrols that either walk directly into your path or remain frustratingly out of reach with no conceivable way of successfully stealth killing them. Those mud puddles although an excellent idea in theory are actually very rare & only placed in some of the more linear sections of the game, there were also several sections that had walls to hide on but I couldn’t find any mud nearby meaning they were pretty much useless. In short, what needed to be a sophisticated & open stealth system felt once again like a rushed afterthought.
One of the best parts of Shadow of the Tomb Raider & an important aspect of Tomb Raider as a whole is the return of extensive swimming sections. Lame attempts were made to make these “cinematic” by having conger eels wrap themselves around Lara as she’s about to emerge from a long tunnel. The animations are the same every time, it’s obvious to the player that there’s no real danger as this is a completely scripted sequence, it happens far too many times in the game & conger eels aren’t even aggressive towards humans. I mainly enjoy these sections just for the old Tomb Raider nostalgia & the beautiful underwater visuals but they do provide some nice variation to both exploration & combat as Lara can now execute stealth kills from underwater.
I’m sure you’d rather hear about the worst part of the game instead which is a flashback to Lara’s childhood involving her play-acting as a famous archeologist around a very small & linear section of Croft Manor. Not only is this probably the worst interpretation of Croft manor to date due to its small scope, the reason it’s so bad is that you’re mainly having kid Lara climb across the roof of the manor with all the scripted bullshit of the main games’ climbing still intact, like drainpipes snapping & bricks crumbling. Lara almost falls to her death several times meaning at the very least I could laugh at just how ludicrous this section was.
*sigh* What else to talk about? The combat is slightly improved over Rise of the Tomb Raider, mainly in the fact that it’s no longer possible to one-hit kill any enemy in the game with zero effort whatsoever. Bafflingly, they used the exact same idea of monster enemies for the third time in a row and the new ones are of course the exact same as the Stormguard & the Deathless Ones. They just look different, how riveting. The same complex tactics apply that I explained in my Rise of the Tomb Raider review: use the shotgun. The strangest thing is, it feels like there isn’t actually much combat in the game in general, especially compared to the previous two. More focus on exploration is certainly not a bad thing but again, it felt like a bigger focus on stealth would have been a natural way to go for Shadow of the Tomb Raider & the lack of combat is another element at odds with an expansive yet inconsequential skill tree.
Eidos Montreal are clearly great developers but this fact is almost more telling of the state of this reboot style of Tomb Raider. This game was clearly not given sufficient time for new gameplay ideas to be fully realised. It was rushed out as the next Tomb Raider game for hardcore fans to throw their money at. They even reused marketing hooks asking fans to discover the story of how Lara “becomes the Tomb Raider.” (The exact same thing they promised in the last game which went nowhere.) The story of Shadow of the Tomb Raider starts off strong but takes a nosedive right back to suffering from the exact same narrative problems that Rise had. Whilst this game is marginally better than the last, it almost becomes more frustrating due to how painfully average it is & how the series is desperately in need of some fresh gameplay concepts that aren’t just the same shit we’ve seen a million times already.
Pros:
Some of the trilogy’s most intense moments.
Some interesting ideas for stealth gameplay.
They tried I suppose.
Cons:
New gameplay ideas often fall flat.
Uninspired level design.
The story & characters are boring & awful.
