Shadow of the Tomb Raider review: More Time Killing than Tomb Raiding
- Not Adam Tye For Once
- Oct 14, 2018
- 5 min read
I was thoroughly looking forward to this final instalment in this rebooted trilogy of one of gaming's greatest icons. I'd found the first a solid game with a decent narrative, fun gameplay and an exciting, grounded reimagining of the previously two dimensional Lara Croft. The second built on this, keeping what made the first game work and adding some of the best level design I've come across in any game to elevate it from decent to pretty darn good. I went in to this latest entry with quite high expectations and a lot of positivity; so I was rather disappointed to see a mixture of laziness, bad writing and by-the-numbers gameplay. By about the halfway point I was already heavily disillusioned and if it weren't for my partner's completionist tendencies and my desire to get as much value from my (staff discounted!) £40 investment I probably would have tapped out at about the 3/4 mark.
So I'm going to follow the example set by the game itself and get all of its strong points out of the way at the start. Looking back on the game as a whole, its opening sequence is comfortably its best. It propagates pop culture's new found obsession with Mexico's Dia de Muertos (kicked off I believe by Spectre). This is used as a dramatic back drop to an opening thirty minutes that sees the player navigate through and work out one of the games impressive tombs, before playing on the general tropes of stories like these (prior tomb raider games, the Uncharted series and the Indiana Jones films) by having the protagonist's curiosity and penchant for reckless adventure backfire and trigger a countdown to the mayan apocalypse. Before the player and Lara can really process this however, the consequences are shown in full force trough a behemoth of a set piece that pulls no punches and really rams home just how badly Lara has screwed things up.
The stakes are high and the mission is clear: after such a start I was stoked to get going with the rest of the game! What I didn't know is that I'd just experienced the best this game has to offer and that the next twenty five hours or so were to be a messy slog through uninspired gameplay, poor story telling and level design that seemed more bothered about padding out the game time than doing anything interesting.
Of the weaknesses mentioned above, the poor gameplay was the one I found most confusing given that this seems like the most easily transplantable element from the previous games. With the stealth sections, though, it felt that transplanting it was all they did. The stealth in this game was, at best, perfunctory. The mechanics were certainly all there and in place but these parts of the game are all so plainly laid out for the player. The Batman Arkham games (being the all time classics that they are) have amazing stealth sections which give the player a huge room with a handful of different ways to take out all the baddies in any order you want and with ever growing tension as your prey becomes more aware of the situation and terrified of their fate. Shadow of the Tomb Raider, on the other hand, lines up your victims in bizarrely linear stealth sections and through the environment laid out around them rarely gives you even two different choices as to how to proceed. Freedom of choice are what you want in these bits but this game puts you on a tight leash.
I quickly realised I wouldn't really be having any fun with stealth in this game, but at least the mechanics actually worked which is more than can be said for the combat. In this portion of gameplay, you're usually going through the motions of standard hiding behind cover and shooting at enemies when they reload; that is until you get to the enemies who charge at you to within a hellishly infuriating melee range, at which point shooting at them isn't an option. Even with a shotgun, the third person camera's relation to the reticule on your screen is so awkward and clumsy that the second combat option - which is just hammer the dodge button until you may or may not trigger the counter move QTE - soon becomes your only way out.
Honestly the tombs and the puzzles they contain were the only part of the game I looked forward to, they look great and can be genuinely challenging, but by the end of the game I realised there hadn't even been that many. I then also came to the realisation that (mercifully in this case) there hadn't actually been that many stealth or combat sections, which really left me quizzical over what I'd just spent the last twenty-five hours or so doing in this game. I realised that the answer was just climbing. And jumping. And swinging. And a lot of falling to my grizzly death. And then a ton more climbing.
As for the level design and story, again I will follow the lead of the game itself by not going into too much detail.
The clever and intricate maps of the second game which loop back on to themselves and see new areas opened up as you get new tools a la Batman Arkham Asylum (I have played other games I swear) are replaced here with rather linear paths interspersed with open areas in the form of small villages, with a ton of side quests and collectibles to pad out the play time. By itself, this is not something which would doom Shadow to being a disappointing game, but it certainly didn't help it come close to being an impressive one.
After the promising start, the story gets muddled pretty quickly and never really does anything with its interesting premise of "protagonist accidentally started the apocalypse" thing that it had going for it. The real low point in the game is a fifteen minute sequence at an oil refinery, which does nothing for the story except hold it up just as something felt like it might be about to get going. It certainly had the feel of something that was put in because they felt the game needed a big set piece with some more explosions rather than any narrative purpose.
All in all, Shadow of the Tomb Raider was a largely disappointing experience that underwhelmed. The opening sequence and the tombs were the highlights but the other seventy per cent of the game was a frustrating mix of sloppy gameplay and lazy padding out. It has enough to it that calling it an out and out bad game feels a bit excessive, but really in the broad spectrum of everything that can be considered "average", it is very close to the bottom.
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