Oh, Tomb Raider… *sigh*
What a cool experiment Tomb Raider 2013 was. Something to do, to learn from, to never repeat as is. Yet it was repeated almost verbatim in Rise of the Tomb Raider, which I still consider to be the most pointless huge budget game in existence. And then it was repeated almost verbatim a third time in Shadow of the Tomb Raider. Except, this time the game is not just pointless, but often shockingly incompetent. Yet, often entertainingly incompetent.
So, is it really almost exactly the same game as the 2013 reboot with new locations? Yeah, pretty much. In some ways it feels almost like the definitive version of the “pattern”, something that I’d rather see instead of 2013, not in addition to it. I mean, the game did learn some things from the previous 2 attempts. Combat is far less often ridiculously over the top and tries to emphasize the stealth far more, some of the more overpowered abilities and elements from Rise are redesigned to not break this emphasis, enemies and the way Lara uses locations is improved in this regard as well. It’s not a fun stealth by any means, mind you, but the intent was good and some of the changes are more then welcome.
Lara has more navigation options with swimming finally returning in full. You get full movement under water, there are even curious attempts to mix in stealth elements when swimming as well and you get to solve basic puzzles in swimming mode too. It’s wonderful. As is the fact that this game, especially with all the Definitive Edition content, has the most of the “Challenge Tombs”, which have been the single most interesting parts of the “survivor” reboot trilogy. Now, they’re in general far less interesting than some of the best examples from Rise and the platforming is still horrendously context-sensitive, but again – it’s the intent that counts.
There’s even an attempt to tell an okay story, which is continuously undermined by the whole “secret organization that Lara fights against” thing that used to be the central plot point of the previous game. It’s not a good story, but it’s tied to the interesting historical and cultural core and the stories in Tomb Raider games were never good anyway, so this one trying to do something less dumb than Rise is a welcome change. If only it still didn’t try to take itself so seriously and pull dramatic scenes at convenient points, no matter how ridiculous, illogical and inconsequential they are. Yet again, intent was there.
With all these good intentions and good changes, you’d expect the game to be a highlight in the trilogy, but, unfortunately, the game just can’t do anything right. The locations feel almost exactly the same and blend together. Despite being the first Tomb Raider to feature an actually huge living town, greatly expanding on what Rise had and what Angel of Darkness could only imply years ago, the town itself is just annoying to get around. And the side-quests that you can get, and yes there are those, are boring. While the talk with the local population, where Lara always speaks English, while most of the characters speak their native language just sounds jarring. The outfits, weapons and skills are expanded, but it feels even more like a “thing we did because all games do that now” than Tomb Raider 2013 where it already felt forced.
But where it fails most spectacularly is in how it doesn’t even try to hide it’s context sensitive nature of “platforming” this time around. Previous 2 games weren’t great at this – you constantly had places you clearly can get to but couldn’t, or places where it looked like there’s no way you can get there, but you could. But most of the jarring ones were usually at least somewhat out of the way. In Shadow of the Tomb Raider, a game supposedly focused on exploration, you get invisible walls or death planes on everything that’s not following the intended path. You can’t get onto something that’s usually climbable if the game doesn’t want you to. You can survive some waters, some similar looking ones, however, trigger a cutscene where Lara is thrown against random rocks and dies. Jumps refuse to connect all the time. And most notably, there are instances where Lara would die if you jump to a lower location that you must get to and that is less than a meter below you just because the game wants you to get to that place from a slightly different direction and if you do it this way you’ll get softlocked otherwise. It’s like the developers didn’t design levels with their systems in mind at all.
And in addition to that you simply have tons of stupid things. The facial animations, especially on Lara, are absolutely hilarious and often reminded me of those videos where people set facial animations in games to more than 100%. Except in case of this game, it’s more like: mouth 150%, rest of the face 80%. There are constant weird glitches and bugs. The push to Steam-based controller support seemingly introduced more problems than it was worth as some context sensitive button prompts just refuse to work on a controller (though the same button may work for absolutely everything else). The game essentially fails in so many surprising ways that you just don’t expect from a huge budget game nowadays when it’s a new product. When you consider the fact that this is essentially a 3rd iteration of the same game, it’s just astonishing how all of this horribleness could be in a game at all.
I would lie if I say that I wasn’t entertained when playing Shadow of the Tomb Raider. Where Rise of the Tomb Raider was just plain boring, Shadow manages to be engaging… just mostly in all the wrong ways. It’s not a game that’s worth playing – just play the 2013 TR instead. But it is kinda funny and enjoyable in a very silly way.