The line between homage, inspiration, and rip-off is a thin and precarious one. All pieces of art owe their creation to something else, but if there’s a series that knows all too well what it’s like to be on either side of that line, it’s Tomb Raider. While the adventures of plucky British archaeologist-slash-gunslinger Lara Croft were once upon a time on the cutting edge of game development, these days you rarely see mention made of her the games without there being some comment about how they are lifting ideas from Naughty Dog’s Uncharted franchise as if they were part of some endless action-adventure ouroboros. I like to think I’ve tried to avoid those comparisons as much as I can in my reviews of the Tomb Raider games since the 2013 soft reboot (which I’ve since learned is apparently called the “Survivor” trilogy for some reason), but by the time we were playing through a flashback sequence of a child Lara I figured it’d be fine to let the facade drop and just point out plainly the ways in which this game is basically just a bland copy of Uncharted 3 with all the life stripped out of it.
Shadow of the Tomb Raider
Linux, macOS, PC, PS4 [reviewed], Stadia, Xbox One
Released: Sep 2018 | Developed: Eidos-Montreal | Published: Square Enix
Genre: Action-Adventure | HLTB: 21 hours
I’ll be honest, I really thought after Rise of the Tomb Raider that the series had found its way. In my experience, the 2013 Tomb Raider is the title that tends to attract the most praise, although if you’ve read my review you’ll know I don’t think it’s all that good; rather, I was left unimpressed by its bog-standard cover-shooter gameplay, drab grey world, and generic cultist villains. All of that makes for a mediocre game, but there’s also the jarring dissonance between its gameplay and narrative, or the sadistic, frankly disturbing glee with which the game focused on Lara’s overly gory death sequences to consider – these are what come to mind when I think about that game more than anything good.
It meant that I wasn’t looking forward to playing Rise, but that one wound up being a pleasant surprise, with a lot of aspects to the game getting a bit of a touch-up and transforming it into a far more serviceable experience. Coming in from that, I definitely feel like I was justified in expecting more of Survivor Lara’s third outing, Shadow of the Tomb Raider (another contender along with Rise for “world’s most generic sequel title”.) I’ll save you a bit of time with this review: Shadow is a dreary disappointment. It’s a return to form, if you like, in that it returns to the mediocre form set by the 2013 Tomb Raider.
Our story this time around sees Lara and her long-suffering companion Jonah on the trail of Paititi, a lost Mayan city somewhere out in the Peruvian jungle. The game opens with the pair discussing the presence of Trinity, a secret society that has been chasing the same ancient gewgaws as them; if you’re keeping track they were the big villains in the previous game, although I’d forgotten them because “generic secret society with an inexplicably massive and well-armoured PMC wing” is a dime-a-dozen enemy, especially for adventure stories that can’t think of any other reason why someone might want to steal an ancient artifact.
Trinity’s schemes in this game revolve around nicking an Incan dagger that is tied into an apocalypse myth. In the grand tradition of thieving British archeology, Lara beats them to the punch at a dig in Mexico and tries to make off with the dagger, but not before demonstrating that she can extrapolate the legend of the deity Chak Chel from a painted fresco (somehow). Unfortunately for Lara all myths are 100% true, so the world immediately starts ending as a massive tsunami rips through the village they’re in, sweeping people away in a torrent of water and ruins – worse yet, Trinity swoop in and both chide Lara for starting the apocalypse and counter-steal the dagger!
Thankfully, Lara is numb to acts of mass destruction and death and quickly hops on a plane to Peru, hot on Trinity’s trail. This allegedly causes some consternation between her and Jonah, but because this game hasn’t got time for extravagances like “character writing” this conflict lasts maybe 10 minutes before Lara digs a parasitic worm out of Jonah’s arm and the two are besties again (because that is a normal interaction between two people, dontcha know? That’s how I make my friends.) Anyway, the pair crash land in Peru because adventure story characters are physically incapable of safely landing anything and roll up to a village in the middle of nowhere that is thankfully supplying workers to a Trinity-run digsite and they all speak impeccable English – gee, that was lucky.
Here’s the thing. All these plot contrivances are the sort of thing I’ve overlooked – and willingly done so, in fact – in other games, but the experience of both playing Shadow and ingesting its painfully insipid writing makes it so much harder to sit back and look past the constant small annoyances. It becomes a game of its own to just pick out all the frustrations and inconsistencies. Take, for example, the notion that Lara grabs the dagger and that causes the apocalypse. The game constantly holds her at fault for this, and she even has mopey moments where she ruminates on all the death her decision has wrought. For the plot to work you need to accept that this is so and that Lara holds a personal responsibility for this, but it makes absolutely no sense to take that position. The idea of an ancient artifact bringing its housing down once it’s picked up is a well-known adventure story trope, but causing a sequence of tsunamis, deadly storms, earthquakes and a massive solar eclipse? Sorry, but some disbeliefs are too much to suspend.
There was an interesting choice made by Eidos-Montreal during development of this game, and that was to strip back on the combat elements. I’m not sure what motivated this; while the cover-shooter elements of Tomb Raider weren’t the most thrilling mechanics in the world, certainly Crystal Dynamics managed to make them a lot more fun in the sequel, especially when combined with the larger maps and more aggressive enemy AI that meant players were forced to constantly move and re-evaluate their positions during protracted fights. In contrast, Shadow features far less combat than either of the previous games, and when it does it’s often treated as its own set-piece moment rather than a natural part of gameplay.
The main way it does this is by a significantly heavier focus on stealth. Lara really can’t take many hits at all in Shadow but to even things out she has a few new ways of dealing with enemies silently, as well as conveniently getting to sneak up on almost every encounter in the game despite there being an entire jungle’s worth of PMCs on high alert for her because apparently she’s fucking Batman now.
Actually, the more apt comparison would be that she is the Predator now. That’s not a pithy statement; the team at Eidos-Montreal explicitly drew from those films and Rambo when working out how Lara should approach jungle combat. To that end, combat rooms are filled with piles of mud that Lara can slather on to make herself harder to see, and walls of standing vines and roots offer a new way for her to hide before leaping out to violently shank unsuspecting goons. Because we’re cosplaying a murderous alien hunter we can also nail baddies with a rope dart and hang them from a tree, which is of course a natural evolution of Croft’s approach to combat and not incredibly unhinged at all.
The game’s not entirely averse to some proper combat though, and when the going gets tough Lara can leap into battle guns a-blazing. It’s definitely a last resort in most cases because of her aforementioned inability to tank hits, so typically when you’re expected to have a shootout it’s again made into an event. There’s little to truly write home about though; nothing about the shooting has been particularly changed or improved, it’s just the same familiar stuff but with less need to maneuver around the battlefield because the AI in these segments has been reduced to shooting gallery levels, as if the developers were deliberately trying to make you pine for the stealth sections.
Instead there’s a greater emphasis on navigating the environments and solving puzzles. The platforming is largely as you’d expect, with more or less the same gamut of options as in Rise. There’s a very “AAA game” bit partway through where the game makes a big song and dance about Lara getting some crampons that let her climb on the underside of overhanging cliffs and it’s hard not to look askance at it as if to say “…and?” Shadow adds a lot more swimming to Lara’s exploration, I guess, with lots of diving into cenotes and making incredibly questionable decisions to swim through partially submerged ruins and caves. Mostly this is unremarkable, but I will say I don’t like adding obnoxious stealth bits to this, partly because they’re a hassle but also because I utterly reject the notion of schools of patrolling piranha and eels guarding passageways that need to be snuck around by swimming through patches of long underwater grasses.
As for the puzzles, they’re also perfectly fine. There aren’t as many as I thought there’d be, actually; a lot of them are saved for the optional challenge tombs you can come across if you explore off the beaten path. There’s a neat bit of accessibility integrated into them in that players can manipulate how many hints the game gives you while solving them. In fact, the difficulty of each key element of the gameplay – puzzles, platforming, and combat – can be changed, often to quite granular degrees; as per usual with accessibility options, I wholeheartedly approve of this. Turning the puzzle difficulty down does however make Lara constantly talk about whatever she needs to do to solve it and makes her seem more detached from reality than normal, as she wanders around shouting to herself about how she needs to hitch a pulley to a bridge or match Mayan numbers to a spinning wheel.
The one puzzle that particularly sticks out to me – in fact, the section in general that I find myself thinking about after having played it – is a flashback sequence where you play as a young Lara clambering around the Croft manor. The obvious point of comparison is Uncharted 3 and 4, both of which featured sequences in which a young Nathan Drake was playable in a flashback (and the latter even had him clambering around an old English manor, although Lara’s traditionally had an old English manor to run around in, so I guess we can chalk that up to the inspiration ouroboros rearing its ugly head again.) The centrepiece of the sequence in Shadow is a chess piece puzzle, but that’s not what I keep coming back to; rather, I keep trying to work out what the writers were trying to achieve with it.
On the one hand, they might’ve just included it because it’s kind of a trope; y’know, Indiana Jones did it, so let’s just follow in those well-trodden footsteps. But it also feels too close to those sequences from Uncharted to be a coincidence. The thing is, in those games the young Drake segments each serve the same purpose, which is to give context to the personal relationships that define his character arc in their respective games – first his initial meeting with Sully, and then his memories of his long-lost brother Sam. Lara doesn’t really have that. We get a tiny glimpse of her father, with whom we’re told she enjoys a difficult relationship, but it struggles to come across in the segment, largely because we don’t spend any time with him at all. By the end of it, it turns out we’ve been reliving the time just before his death, but because he’s not been an even remotely central or relevant character to any of Lara’s stories before (or even particularly during) this game, it lacks any real punch, and none of the flashback is in any way referred back to, so it stands as a non-sequitur.
I suppose what I’m trying to convey is that Shadow felt like a hastily cobbled-together mush. Playing it was a slog in the realest terms; while some games feel tough to get through, I can’t remember the last one where it felt so hard to simply decide to turn the game on and keep going. It’s such a bland experience, from the dull writing to the samey encounters built around trudging through slow stealth sections. There never felt like much hope it would get better, and indeed that was borne out as the game muddled along, never quite threatening to get interesting, before it all collapsed into a disjointed pile of guff and wasted time with the genuinely bad ending. I usually have the expectation that AAA games like this are likely to be at worst fine, but even that was too lofty a peak for Shadow of the Tomb Raider to reach.
3/7 – MEDIOCRE.
A game that makes you go, “Well, it’s alright…” but it’s a kind of drawn-out, unsure, and reluctant decision? These are those games. Might just be worth playing if you can get it on the cheap.
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