Shadow of the Tomb Raider Review – I’m Just So Tired of Raiding All These Tombs

What’s Actually New?

With a sequel, developers have to balance keeping the core of what makes the series what it is while still offering us something new. We’ve seen series break out from that, such as with the progression from Batman: Arkham Asylum to Arkham City, and the progression from The Witcher to The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings to The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. In both cases, we saw a relatively enclosed space open up to encompass a huge world and saw the gameplay change to embrace that.

With Shadow of the Tomb Raider, it doesn’t feel like there’s much new here.

The story and setting, of course, are both new, and full of gorgeous tombs, towns, and wilderness to explore, and with characters to meet and storylines to experience.

But what about the rest of the game?

The team’s biggest focus seems to have been on making that comparatively big city work. Paititi, the hidden village, is the biggest hub yet in a Tomb Raider game, and it’s big enough that I was still getting lost in it later into the game.

Unfortunately, what you actually do in Shadow of the Tomb Raider hasn’t changed much from Rise. It’s evolved, but it’s mostly just the same thing with a wrinkle to it.

For example, in combat, stealth is a bigger part of play. If you played Splinter Cell: Conviction, you’ll be familiar with the way it works now. Getting into open combat doesn’t mean you can’t play stealth anymore. If you can break line of sight long enough to dive into some bushes or put your back against an ivy-covered wall, you can surprise the guy that was chasing you just moments ago. You can hide up in trees and surprise enemies from above, too. It feels more proactive and less like a shooting gallery. It’s actually really fun. You can cover yourself in mud and go after guys Predator style, but I was having a tough time determining what effect this actually had on moment-to-moment combat.

I wish more of the combat worked like that, though. When you fight supernatural enemies, for example, you never get the chance to get the drop on them. They’re always getting you from across a chasm or coming out of a hole in the wall, and while I think it’s meant to be scary, it ends up being kind of boring. It’s just plowing through one enemy after another.

You’re still working with the four-point weapon wheel that features Lara’s now-iconic bow, a pistol, a shotgun, and a rifle, each with its own specialized ammo. It’s the same as it’s been for two games now.

Exploration is equally unchanged. There’s new stuff – you can climb on certain ceilings, rappel from walls, and there’s a lot more emphasis on going under water. The team clearly put a lot of work into making Lara swim well, and it actually works pretty well. I don’t think I’ve felt this good about swimming in a game since maybe Assassin’s Creed Origins in 2016. There aren’t many games where it’s fun to navigate underwater, so that’s an achievement on its own.

But all the climbing and exploration uses exactly the same design language that it has always used. I don’t mind the white-painted ledges, but if I have to fire one more arrow into a post with rope around it, I’m going to scream. The same goes for the jumping puzzles where you’re swinging on a pole, then leaping to a grappling point, swinging off, and then grabbing onto a wall.

It’s not that it’s not somewhat fun, it’s that it’s old hat by this point. It feels clunky, slow, and outdated. I’ll admit that it coming out a week after Spider-Man isn’t helping. I certainly don’t expect Lara to whip around the jungle the way Spidey whips around NYC, but it feels a bit like going from riding a motorcycle to a tricycle with a squeaky wheel.

One thing that I’d had high hopes for was the addition of outfits with stat changes on them – making you quieter, giving you additional experience points, and so forth. You get your first one pretty early on in the game, but it feels like a half-baked idea.

First, shortly after you start collecting these outfits, you arrive in Paititi, where they insist that you dress in a traditional Paititi dress. The dress is cute, but you don’t get a chance to mod it. If you put the moddable outfit on, people just won’t talk to you because you’re a scary future witch covered in murder weapons. You spend a lot of the game in this dress, and in a guard outfit, and not as much of the game in this one. There are other outfits you can put on if you’ve played the other Tomb Raider games and have saves on your hard drive, but again, these aren’t moddable and provide not benefits.

So, you can play dress-up with Lara, but for only a very small segment of the game, and the effects make only a couple of the outfits feel worth it.

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