This review is likely to be somewhat long and rambling. For one thing, the game in question was intended by the creators to round off the reboot trilogy, thus has to be considered in the total context of not just the other two reboot games but the franchise as a whole.
For another, it hooks into the Gail Carriger book I just read and the plot concepts that I am currently wrestling with. There's a clear illustration of this around the first quarter of the game; the big Jonah/Lara argument after the destruction of Cozumel, where Jonah is arguing to help the locals and Lara is arguing she needs to personally go off and fix things.
In any case, I'm going to try to walk through this semi-methodically as Graphics, Gameplay, Story, and Culture and Context.
So here we go!
Graphics-wise, I find it a mixed bag. There is no denying that the lighting is improved and the jungle foliage is ridiculously lush. It also has a more saturated look, appropriate to the climate certainly, and one does have to admit that Rise of the Tomb Raider went too far the other way in having a rather dull look color-wise.
It also impacts the system to a ridiculous extent; it took a long while to find a combination of settings that would run without actually crashing to desktop, but didn't introduce some abhorrent artifact. Between the fine details of foliage and grass, draw distance problems, and some deep failure in either texture sampling or anti-aliasing, all of the pre-made settings suffered from shimmer and sparkle in everything from hair to distant buildings.
There is another graphics issue that relates to gameplay. The "Bat Vision" introduced in the first reboot game is simply layered on just as it was for that game. But it no longer works right in the upgraded graphics and more complicated environments. The overlay is ugly and it effectively reduces the information you get, not adds to it. Also, use of this mode is tied firmly to puzzle clues, which meant if I hit the button to see if any one of fifty similar-looking containers actually contained crafting material, I'd hear for the fortieth time Lara say, "I need to find a lever to lower that basket!"
And, yeah, we're sliding into gameplay here. This game emphasizes stealth (more on that later) but this makes the Lara Vision a problem not a solution. Whereas in, say, the Arkham games you would turn on Detective Vision in order to see where the mooks were in a darkened room, when you turn on Lara Vision it marks only those enemies that were in line-of-sight at that moment. Worse, the nature of the overlay means you can no longer see which way they are looking! Oh, but even worse? If you are hiding in shrubbery, the shrubbery turns bright white in the overlay meaning you can't see shit in any direction.
They almost fixed this with a lingering "heightened senses" effect you get from ingesting certain plants. But this one overlays all enemies with bright white, meaning all you can see is white blobs and you can't tell if they are looking at you, readying an arrow, or being observed (a useful clue -- or at least it was in the previous two games). It also lasts for about thirty seconds and you can only carry a small handful of the herbs with you.
The last is the basic failure, and it is where graphics as part of the design concept slams into play concept. Lara's old enemy from the previous series has returned, and is more dangerous than ever. Forget cultists or animals or pit traps; the thing most likely to kill Lara is the camera.
First off, this is a game that finally delivers the old Tomb Raider experience. Puzzles are back with a vengeance (even if most of them are optional). Combat is reduced. Traversal is more varied (and much more difficult) than ever before. Enemies are much more real and deadly and even on Easy setting one guy with an obsidian-studded mace can totally ruin your day.
But...
This is the same basic problem I have with the difficulty scale in most games, and the nature of elite and boss enemies in those same games. Increasing difficulty increases the number of hits the enemy takes to go down. That does make it more difficult, but it is like saying it is more difficult to play piano with one hand. It isn't more interesting. You just have to go back to the save point more often.
In the case of Shadow most of the puzzles are difficult in a good way. They actually take a bit of brain work to figure out. (Although, to be honest, the most difficult part of the puzzles is not figuring out how to jury-rig an ancient mechanism, it is figuring out what the game designers wanted you to do. Which is often completely at odds with what seems plausible to actually work.)
This is also true for the traverses, and here I really have to disagree with the game. In the earlier games there were multiple plausible paths. In this game, particularly, there is only one path. And as with the puzzles, half the time it isn't "I'll bet you could push through the brush there," but instead, "I'll bet the game designers wanted me to do another jump, so let's see what is exactly fifteen feet away."
And, yes. It isn't that it seems logical you'd be able to leap straight up from an underhang. It is that you know what the game designers are likely to do. Depth cues are difficult in this game and the camera is often constrained or even locked during jumps, meaning you can't actually look around and see which way you might need to go.
You end up just going whatever way seems like the designers would probably want you to, and if that was wrong, you die and go back to a distant save point. Again and again. This isn't difficult; this is just frustrating.
And that's only starting with the camera. It is always moving, always trying to angle for the best cinematic angle. When you are lining up for a difficult jump or trying to target an enemy, the camera is moving. During the scripted sequences, with things falling down and explosions going off, the camera shakes and goes sideways and so on, plus you stagger as well (and not always in the same direction.) The game also has a delight in the canned animations that must play at the best camera angle; during swimming sequences, if you rise to an air pocket, a canned animation takes over, yanking you out of any sense of what direction you were swimming in or where the thing was you were trying to reach.
And that is all over the game. Fights and falls are placed just after massive load-ins of new environments, meaning even running off an SSD you get killed because the scene started to play before the frame rate came up above 1. Again, none of this is fun. It is challenging, but the challenge is in trying to anticipate what the computer is going to do. Every jump you make, there's some subtle rule going on about when the game will actually respond to the control, and when it will ignore it -- making the jump doesn't give you a sense of physical accomplishment, it gives you a sense of, at best, playing Simon Says.
At least the dreaded Quicktime Events are largely absent. They've modified them again, though; guessing when to hit the button has been made easier, but they decided to have the label pop up at the last second. So, again, instead of watching a life-or-death struggle against a jaguar, you are watching a yellow circle waiting to see if it is going to contain an "E" or an "F."
I was going to hold off on this but, basically, this is the choice the game made; to prioritize the cinematic experience. The scripted sequences, the frequent cut scenes, the canned animations with their own extra-special camera angles; it is all done to show you exactly the game they want to show you. So little things like multiple paths to the goal are looked on with horror. If you jumped left and used the vine to get over to the broken bridge, it wouldn't look as cool as the path with the rock pick that they intended you to take.
The very first reboot game, Tomb Raider 2013, suffered from split vision. There was the vision of the writer. And there was the vision of the design team, which seemed to be largely, "The committee has determined people like crafting and looting and collectables and DLC in their games, so we need to put all of those in." This led to the worst case of ludonarrative dissonance I have ever played.
Shadow of the Tomb Raider, though; on the one hand it found its way back to the roots with an emphasis on traversal and puzzle-solving and a de-emphasize on giant gun battles, but it did this a bit haphazardly. They made these changes in intent, then re-used and re-treaded what were already somewhat creaky mechanics.
The Lara Vision being a case in point. The new intention for combat is stealth, and there are some new stealth tools...but then they wrecked it by re-using a vision that doesn't support it, and choosing to upgrade all the enemy so they can't be killed with any of the silenced weapons! The silenced pistol is an expensive buy that is possible at about the 1/4 point at the earliest -- and there was one enemy encounter where it could have been used. One. Every other enemy is wearing helmets and reacts to getting hit by a silenced pistol with calling in 2x their number in magical teleporting reinforcements.
Heck, the game scripts in these magical teleporting reinforcements even if you do beat the stealth portion.
The enemy still bobs and weaves, but the new camera and an even more janky sight picture means it is basically impossible to line up a shot during melee. And yet, they decided that open melee wasn't what they wanted, so Lara is realistically fragile to it. The end result is you stealth until the game gives you an unbreakable-by-design setup, at which point you use a shotgun or machine gun to hose the area that contains the rapidly dodging enemy. And pop healing herbs like they grew like weeds (which, well, they do!)
So let's talk culture. There are overheard conversations, way many letters and codices and diaries you can collect and read, and plenty of NPCs to talk to. Well, listen to them talk; this is not a Bioware game. You don't get to select a response. The conversations are interesting on paper. Which pretty much underlines that writers are the cheapest part of a modern game.
The voice acting of the main cast is fine. The NPCs are a bit canned. The best I can say is that they seem to be in the appropriate languages. But...
The Peruvians are all speaking bog-standard Mexican Spanish. And whatever Nahuatl or something is being spoken in Patiti, at least it seems to be spoken by people comfortable in it. There just isn't a lot of voice acting going along with it.
And, yeah. There's a nice bit on all the multiple dialects going around, but that's really part of a long-winded grind mechanic where you read inscriptions in order to learn a language so you can decipher another inscription that tells you were there's some buried gold you can use to purchase that silencer or whatever.
To give them credit, Patiti really is a Mayincatec culture; fleeing Maya came to this location and hooked up with local pre-Inca when their own agricultural methods were a total fail in the highlands of Peru. Then some Aztecs moved in and formed their own insular religious ruling party. Still, the game doesn't go out of its way to identify which culture you are looking at from one moment to the next, making it all a bit of a pre-Columbian mish-mosh.
And unusually for a game, there's a bit where the mythology being tapped to solve the latest puzzle machine is...the Stations of the Cross (it was a Catholic Missionary who set that one up.).
It is again hit or miss. There are fewer of the full 3d artifacts to examine, but those are done in some detail. There are a lot of chunks of mythology being read off inscriptions but the iconography isn't there; it's the same damned plinth every time. And...in the Young Lara sequence, she gets a chance to look through some display cases at Croft Manor and one is identified as containing "The death mask of Agamemnon." I think it even name-drops Mycenae...but it is a stone monkey-mask of a thing. I've seen the Mask of Agamemnon. I've been in the museum where they keep the Mask of Agamemnon. This was not the Mask of Agamemnon.
Which means it is time to move on to Story. But I don't care for that at the moment. This game is as I said trying to conclude the "birth of a Tomb Raider" as begun in Tomb Raider 2013. At the end of this, she is as close as the reboot series is going to get to the experienced and hardened Lara Croft of earlier games.
Except not really. For every little step it takes that way -- such as elements of the iconic outfit sneaking back in, and increasing confidence and skills -- it misses. The twin pistols are nowhere to be seen. And even more weirdly, the same mocap animation from the first game is still there. It made sense then that inexperienced Lara would do a desperate scramble for cover or flailing attack with an ice axe. But Lara, as much as she is doing a coldly practiced stealth take-down in this game, still flails and scrambles. Whereas the previous Lara Croft could be flamboyantly gymnastic, this one still climbs over a low barrier with all the grace of a graceless thing.
Apparently the original cut of the game had Natla (the Big Bad from several of the previous games) making a Marvel Cinematic Universe style cameo. That got taken out before the game shipped. But here's where they have left it; they've evolved the character away from the scared and desperate kid doing the best she can, but they don't seem to have evolved to anything in particular. There's a lot to go before we've got a solid character; at current she is still uncomfortably balanced between various things that no longer quite fit.
Which can be, actually, a good place for a character. But how I'm having to deal with that same problem with my own girl archaeologist -- well, I'll leave that to another essay.
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