Video Game Review: Shadow of the Tomb Raider

The lovely folks over at Square Enix provided me with an early copy of Shadow of the Tomb Raider — the final game in the new Tomb Raider trilogy. Don’t worry, I’ll avoid spoilers!

SUMMARY
In this game, Lara Croft has accidentally started the Mayan apocalypse and travels around South America in hopes of finding a way to stop the events that have unfolded. Trinity is back at it, and are gung-ho on using the artifacts which have started the end of days to remake the world the way they see fit.

STORY
The main story is a great premise and is very engaging. Adding to the fun are tons of subplots surrounding you from side quests down to conversations between villagers. I stopped near a couple who were having an argument in the marketplace because the shopkeep wasn’t open yet and the customer wanted to make a purchase. Another encounter was a couple breaking up because one of them wanted to leave the town and the other wanted to stay. This becomes even more immersive if you toggle the Voice-over Immersion mode, which sets most characters to speak in their native tongue rather than English.

GRAPHICS
I’m confused as to why you have the option to choose between “high resolution” and “high framerate” rather than using terminology that’s a little more obvious about what you’re selecting. That being said, the graphics in this game are stunning in 4k! The points of interest, the landscapes, the people, the creatures… you name it. It’s impressive.

AUDIO
The background sounds and ambient noises are well-placed and appropriate for the situation. Having localized music in surround sound fade in and out based on your proximity, conversations continuing with or without you present, and the subtle differences in the sound of your footsteps based on what you’re walking on all add to the game developers’ main goal of immersing you completely in this environment. It’s done very well.

CONTROLS
The past Tomb Raider games have had relatively janky controls compared to this one. They’ve smoothed out some of the faults, and I’ve very few incidents where I attempted to jump to something and fallen to my death instead. The controls are intuitive and reminiscent of past games in the series, which is great for both those who are familiar with the series and those who are picking this up for the first time. And as someone who doesn’t have the best memory ever, having a menu full of controller maps and reminders on how to do every command combo is crazy helpful.

Image sourced from Square Enix

PROS
They went for immersive and the definitely accomplished that goal, for the most part! It’s cinematic, the puzzles are fun, the climbing isn’t infuriating, and the game has actually gotten me to the edge of my seat at certain points with the suspense. The Skill Tree has a lot of really cool talents that you can acquire, allowing you to focus on stealth, combat, or survival skills. A lot of these skills, when used in combat, can be reminiscent of Rockstar’s Batman games (stringing up enemies from branches), or Assassin’s Creed (stealth assassinations), but it’s different enough to not feel like a blatant rehash. The stealth combat interactions are even better than before, since you can drop in and out of active combat by breaking the enemy’s line of sight and diving into cover.

CONS
I did notice some redundancies, which take from the sense of immersion, like villager character designs. A couple other big peeves of mine are having to watch Lara take a big fat deep breath in every single one of the air pockets in underwater levels. You have roughly a minute of air before you need to take a breath, so having a decent-sized underwater level that you want to explore results in somewhere between 10 and 20 breaths if you stretch the time between air pockets to its max. Similarly, watching Lara die can sometimes be downright painful. There’s a spot where, if you fall, you land in a pit of wolves. Lara injures her knee, and is torn apart by animals. This is not a quick death. I’m not so much disturbed by the scene as I am annoyed that each death can take a pretty long time to finish up before you can reset the save.

FINISH HIM
The level of immersion is downright impressive, and even though the deaths take a very long time to finish watching before you can start again, each one of them is interesting in its own way. If it’s skippable, I haven’t figured out how to do that yet. The difficulty levels are different than what you’re used to seeing in games, in a good way. Typically you’ll see just a decrease in resources and increase in enemy levels. This gives you additional options to make puzzles more difficult to solve by making the markers on walls and trees less obvious, in addition to the usual options.

All in all, this is a game I can definitely get behind! I’ve always been a fan of the Tomb Raider series, and it’s great to see these last few games really get it right.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider will be released on September 14th, 2018 on Xbox One, PS4, and Steam.

If you pre-order The Digital Croft Edition, you get:
3 additional weapons & outfits
Original Game Soundtrack
48 hour early access
Additional Skills Booster Pack
Xbox Live Avatar outfit (Xbox One only)
PS4 Theme (PS4 only)
Steam Exclusive Wallpaper (Steam only)