It's so large you could get lost just exploring this one location. When you hit a certain hub area, Shadow Of The Tomb Raider finds its stride. Shadow comes into its own and sets itself apart around the 25% completion mark. If Shadow feels too familiar from the get go, don't give up in the first few hours. Remember the first time you played a TellTale game and were blown away? Then five or six games later you were thought, "Are we still doing the same exact thing yet again?". Silly Easter eggs to fans aside, the core of the game feels nearly identical to the previous two entries of the rebooted trilogy. My second playthrough will be all old-school Lara though for maximum lulz, though. Personally I couldn't play Shadow with the model for very long, because it felt too much like playing Dead Rising where Chuck has on some absurdly silly outfit.
And it's a hilariously fun nod to the players who have been following this franchise throughout the years. This may be a fictional universe, but the game still wants you to think about how people in South American nations are treated by the wealthier nations to the north.īut if you don't care about heavy concepts or social commentary, there's plenty of amusingly silly options to lighten the game up a bit. Want to play through as the old school, 32-bit Lara from Tomb Raider 2 or Tomb Raider 3? Guess what? You can.
It's clear the developers went out of their way to make the cultures and people Lara comes across more of a central focus here, rather than something to be trampled through while she seeks out trinkets. In Rise, the pseudo-stakes felt more personal. In fact, the game starts with the world on the brink of utterly ending because Lara couldn't keep her hands off an artifact. This time around there are finally some consequences for her impulsive actions. The narrative has strongly shifted here, and there's a big focus on Croft's privilege as an ultra-rich white woman tromping across the world taking whatever she wants. If you just want to plunder old sarcophagi without giving any thought to who's buried there, this may not be the Tomb Raider for you. However, the imagery and name speak more to what we see in the game - a changing world and a changing Lara in a dying world brought about by some bad decisions in an ancient tomb.
Shadow of the tomb raider review full#
With a title like Shadow Of The Tomb Raider and a marketing campaign full of of eclipse imagery, it would be easy to think this ultimate version of Tomb Raider was full of gimmicks. But this time around, in the climax of the new trilogy, we find her against the greatest stakes, so her trials and tribulations are understandably the most violent yet. Yet again, this entry is another third-person action adventure that doubles down on killing cult members, skinning animals, and horribly injuring a even more vulnerable Lara.įrom plane crashes to jaguar attacks to being crushed while drowning, Square Enix just loves to see this iteration of the Croft heiress fall into painful situations. After the snowy sequel Rise Of The Tomb Raider, we're now headed into the South American jungle with Shadow of the Tomb Raider.