Shadow of the Tomb Raider is one of those games that has both the potential to take your breath away and frustrate the hell out of you. As a fan of the first two games in this reinvention of the Tomb Raider franchise (Tomb Raider and Rise of the Tomb Raider) I had high hopes for this final installment. When Crystal Dynamics and Square Enix breathed new life into Lara Croft back in 2013, it was clear that they wanted to take everything that was great about Naughty Dog's Uncharted series and build upon that formula. What separated it from other action-adventure games was the crafting and stealth elements. Is Lara Croft more badass than Nathan Drake? That's something that would take the Internet years to debate, but she is without-a-doubt a lot more violent. While Lara Croft had always been a fan favorite among gamers with her dual pistols, pixelated environments, and ridiculously large breasts, this recreation brought a level of realism to the character and weaved a story that was both tragic and intriguing at the same time.
Shadow of the Tomb Raider picks up two months after the events of Rise of the Tomb Raider. Lara and her long time friend (and series constant) Jonah Maiava are once again racing the shadow organization known as Trinity to an artifact that may or may not have the power to end the world. Because who leaves old junk lying around that can end the lives of millions? As it turns out, on top of ritually sacrificing half their civilization, not making a calendar that goes past 2012, and being in a Mel Gibson movie, the Mayans can add bad housekeeping to things they didn't exactly think through. This Mayan artifact does have the power to end the world, as Lara finds out after removing the Dagger of Ix Chel from a temple in Cozumel. After being captured by Trinity and taken to their leader, a typically misinformed villain by the name of Pedro Dominguez, Lara finds out that the dagger must be placed into the Silver Box of Chak Chel before the "the Cleansing" or the world will be destroyed during the coming eclipse. To Lara this sounds crazy, but when a tsunami hits (in a very graphic scene of death and destruction), she realizes that the threat is not only true, there's a limited amount of time in which she can stop it.
As the story progresses, you find yourself in a race to prevent the Mayan Apocalypse, stop an evil cult, and save the hidden city of Paititi and its residents. In order to do this, Lara must take the Dagger of Ix Chel and pierce a box hidden away by Andres Lopez - a missionary sent to Paititi by Trinity during the Spanish conquest of South America. Only then will the wielder be granted the power of the god Kukulkan and the ability to recreate the world or stop its destruction. Unsurprisingly, there's a catch. Let's face it, Trinity isn't going to give up that easily. After failing to stop Dominguez (or Amaru as the people of Paititi know him as), from piercing the box, Lara enlists the help of the Yaaxil - a group of deranged and monstrous looking human (or humanoid) creatures who savagely kill anybody they disagree with - and their leader Crimson Fire, whose role is to protect the box and facilitate the ritual that can set the end game in motion. Does Lara succeed in her endeavors? I wont' spoil the end of the game for you, but I think it's safe to say that this isn't the last we'll be seeing of our favorite Tomb Raider.
Lets talk about the gameplay. Very few action-adventure games are "flawless" in terms of controls and responsiveness. Just like games that came before, Shadow of the Tomb Raider has its moments of frustration in terms of buttons not responding when jumping to ledges or swinging across a ravine to dig safely into a cliffside. And I'll be honest, if the death animations weren't so long and drawn out, I wouldn't be so impatient in those moments, but we'll get back to that. While Shadow of the Tomb Raider was given decent scores by critics, they all seemed to agree on one thing . . . the gameplay gets stale. That doesn't mean that it's not fun. What it means is that they didn't exactly do anything to reinvent or keep fresh the gameplay of the previous entries. While they added a few new stealth mechanics this time around, such as rubbing mud on your face and hiding in the plant life on the walls, this is an element that is used very little unless you go out of your way to use it. Besides that, it's more shooting, ducking, and frantically trying to find cover that bullets won't go through. They also brought back the crafting system that can be accessed through the camps spread out across the map. Here, you can upgrade your weapons, craft new clothing, and hear what's on Lara's mind after a long day of climbing things and killing people. In retrospect, Lara Croft doesn't exactly have a working moral compass.
When it comes to negative things about this game, there's a few more issues than I would have liked. Like I said, I'm a huge fan of what they've done with the character. However, as a games journalist, it's my job to approach these things objectively. After the initial release of Shadow of the Tomb Raider, journalists and Reddit users took very little time to voice their offense at the long - and unnecessary - death scenes. If you haven't played one of the newer Tomb Raider games, let me tell you about what happens when you die. There are very few moments in any of the three games where Lara dies and life (not hers) goes on. No, when Lara dies, she usually falls, gets crushed by rocks, stabbed by something, and sometimes all three of those, in an un- skippable cut scene that can take up to a minute to get through. The complaint made by journalists and reddit users (besides the obvious) was that in 2018 and with a female protagonist, those death scenes should be a little more sensitive. While I agree that they're annoyingly long, I find it ironic that people are talking about sensitivity when Lara Croft is racking up a body count in the thousands at the end of each game. In the words of the great Maximus Decimus Meridius, "Are you not entertained?!" I would be a lot more entertained if I didn't have to spend five minutes watching Lara get crushed by a rock every time she falls into a river.
There's also an issue with internet connectivity in this game. The great thing about gaming in 2018 (and even before) is that you can put your consoles into an idle mode so that each time you want to turn your game back on, you don't have to sit through the hours (okay, maybe that's exaggerating) of opening trademarks and menus. I know that I'm playing on an Xbox One, I know that it was developed by Eidos Montreal, and I know that it was published by Square Enix. The probabilities are high that those things aren't going to change the next time I turn on the game. However, due to the game needing an Internet connection, you have to endure these things each time you turn it on. You can't just press the power button on your console and jump right back into the place you were when you turned it off. Maybe that's what one would call a first-world problem, but in terms of minor inconveniences, they add up pretty quick in this game. In the story, the game was sort of a let down. After spending the last two games weaving this elaborate plot that gave gamers a family mystery to solve and plenty of intrigue about the shadowy organization known as Trinity, the game ended in a somewhat lackluster way. Again, this is 2018, the Mayan Apocalypse theme has been beaten to death and continues to be beaten to death by the Assassin's Creed franchise, though, I'm not entirely sure where they stand with that these days. I want to break journalistic tradition by saying, on a personal level, as somebody deeply invested in these games, I wanted so much more.
On the positive (or brighter) side, the world that's been crafted in Shadow of the Tomb Raider is beautiful and terrifying. The developers over at Eidos Montreal did an incredible job of creating a game that motivates you to explore things that no sane human would go anywhere near in real life. The tombs are challenging, the rewards (though mostly cosmetic) are worth the plunge (or climb) into the unknown, and there's plenty to explore off the beaten path. You could tell that there was a lot of development time put into side-quests. Unlike the last two entries, the side-quests in this game aren't just novelty things to extend the gameplay. There's actual motivation for doing these things. Whether they send you to locations you wouldn't have stumbled upon otherwise, or open a new thread in the narrative, each of the characters you come across who offers you a side-quest is layered and well developed.
With Lara, this game really dives into her back story. You learn more about the demise of her mother, which the other games rarely expanded upon, and you get closure on the events that led to her father's death. The really interesting thing about this is that you don't learn these things through random lines of dialogue. You actually get to play backstory scenes as a young Lara, traversing an obstacle course made in her yard, scaling the outside walls of the manor, and solving a mystery in her father's study. Yes, they did something similar in Uncharted 4, but one can't help but appreciate the effort they put into tying up loose ends.
At the end of the day, Shadow of the Tomb Raider accomplishes what it set out to do. When the game was first announced in the weeks leading up to E3 2018, there was a lot of concern put in motion. Not only were people confused as to why the trailer was premiered online instead of at E3 to maximize hype, there was also a lingering fear that putting the game solely in the hands of Eidos Montreal, who is known mostly for their Deus Ex games, was a bad idea. Though both Eidos and Crystal Dynamics are subsidiaries of Square Enix, it was clear that Crystal Dynamics had other, more important things to work on like (hopefully) the long gestating Avengers game. All in all, Shadow of the Tomb Raider has managed to keep an aggregate score of 80% while racking up award nominations from the Game Critics Awards, Gamescom, and the Golden Joystick Awards. Will it win in the year of Red Dead Redemption 2? Probably not, but Eidos Montreal does deserve some praise. While the story feels somewhat bloated and unoriginal at times throughout, the game design, environments, challenge tombs, and conclusion wraps up the trilogy nicely in a beautiful game full of mystery, intrigue, and even terror.
Reviewed by: Josh Pederson
Played On: Xbox One
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