Shadow of the Tomb Raider

[Dirty Harry Potter]

Duck me. I’m finding this game almost unplayable after binging on Naughty Dog’s games for the last two months. 
 

it’s awful. The story, the acting, the controls and the graphics don’t look all that after uncharted 4 and TLOU2.

 

Up to Lara as a kid flashback.. but think I might give up on this one. 
 

[Hitcher]

At least it runs @60fps.

[feltmonkey]

4 hours ago, Dirty Harry Potter said:

Duck me. I’m finding this game almost unplayable after binging on Naughty Dog’s games for the last two months. 
 

it’s awful. The story, the acting, the controls and the graphics don’t look all that after uncharted 4 and TLOU2.

 

Up to Lara as a kid flashback.. but think I might give up on this one. 
 

 

What are you playing it on? On PC it looks sensational, especially with the ray tracing on. Having said that, I'm having similar feelings to you about the game in general. I don't mind the gameplay particularly, although it's consistently a slightly worse at everything Uncharted. I don't like the atmosphere and the morally vacant nature of the story and the protagonist. 

 

The atmosphere doesn't suit Tomb Raider. The earlier games were always quite light and fun, but this wants to be dark and gritty. The series has always had a slightly sadistic streak in it's treatment of Lara, with a lot made of the many death animations, but the newer ones take this up several notches. The ultra-realistic graphics mean that seeing her get impaled over and over again is genuinely upsetting.

 

Other stuff happens in the story that is unnecessarily harsh and grim. Lara comes across as an uncaring, entitled idiot. All this puts me off. It's not terrible, I'd say it is quite a decent game, but I do yearn for a Nathan Drake wisecrack or some general Uncharted silliness. 

[Hitcher]

You shouldn't go in expecting the story to be on the same level as TLoU2 but the gameplay is better imo.

[PaB]

[Gambit]

13 hours ago, Dirty Harry Potter said:

Duck me. I’m finding this game almost unplayable after binging on Naughty Dog’s games for the last two months. 
 

it’s awful. The story, the acting, the controls and the graphics don’t look all that after uncharted 4 and TLOU2.

 

Up to Lara as a kid flashback.. but think I might give up on this one. 
 

 

The Lara as a kid is the worst most unbelievable (even for this game) part. It doesn't get much better after.

[Dirty Harry Potter]

Playing it on PS Pro, and it looks ok. But the acting, characters and terrible, terrible story are really grating. 

 

Plus Lara is such an awful person, she deserves to be impaled on a spike.

 

And not in a good way.

[SeanR]

2 hours ago, Gambit said:

 

The Lara as a kid is the worst most unbelievable (even for this game) part. It doesn't get much better after.

 

they clearly lifted inspiration from the Nathan-as-a-kid bits in UC4

 

(I know they tried it previously, in both TLR and Chronicles, but that was different devs)

[NecroMorrius]

Going from TLOU2 to this is just... wow. It’s a complete joke. Everything about it feels naff and cheap. Lara is a monster of a human being and the poor dumb villagers who need saving (or killing) by the dabbling white girl are borderline offensive. I have no idea if there’s supposed to be any kind of stealth because I’m half way through the game and there have been about two combat sequences that weren’t mowing down stupid monsters with the world’s worst shotgun. In those combat sequences I didn’t even attempt stealth, just ran into the middle of the circle full of waist high cover and tapped LT RT to auto-aim at heads until everyone was dead. For some reason I can only choose between the two most awful costumes I’ve ever seen in a videogame. 

 

I remember liking the first two, but this one feels like a real knock-off. 
 

It does look nice at 4k/120fps/HDR/Atmos at least. 
 

What was up with that stations of the cross puzzle? It made no sense at all. Even after looking up the answer (and finding pages of people also going (“eh?”) I still don’t get it.

 

Edit - finished. What a whimper for the series, which started promisingly enough. Really hateful trash. 

[deerokus]

I liked the previous two but this one was so boring I dropped it early on. Rubbish game. 

[NecroMorrius]

I played on normal and could have ramped the difficulty up, but the game was insultingly easy. I walked through every stealth combat sequence (all six of them, lol) with a pistol while healing. There’s a bit where it takes your weapons away and you can simply run from enemy to enemy pressing Y.  I’m pretty sure the game has more upgrades than it does enemies. The last boss was absurdly easy. 

 

[CarloOos]

1 hour ago, Moz said:

I played on normal and could have ramped the difficulty up, but the game was insultingly easy. I walked through every stealth combat sequence (all six of them, lol) with a pistol while healing. There’s a bit where it takes your weapons away and you can simply run from enemy to enemy pressing Y.  I’m pretty sure the game has more upgrades than it does enemies. The last boss was absurdly easy. 

 

Ha, yeah that was something I noticed. Fair enough, I guess they wanted to address criticisms that the previous two games were too combat focused, but as a result everything you do is based around upgrading guns and combat skills you barely ever use. 
 

It was the same with the ‘toggle the paint off’ mode they added. Again, fair enough, it’s a criticism some people had with the previous two, but they clearly didn’t have an actual solution to the problem this causes so you’re just left running around highly detailed environments jumping at everything with no idea what you can actually grab. Which is exactly what the white paint was there to fix in the first place. (I think I got as far as the big spinning wheel of death before giving up on this, where it caused a load of trial and error insta-deaths).

 

I loved the other two but almost everything about this fell flat. It had a couple of decent puzzles and a few visually impressive areas, that’s about it. 

[CarloOos]

Oh, I’ve just remembered another thing that smacked of being half arsed.
 

At one point you’re in a hub area which later gets destroyed in a very flashy volcanic eruption, there’s literally a whole sequence where you have to run through the town as it’s being destroyed. But obviously this would gate off any collectibles the player hadn’t found, so you can actually return to the area afterwards and it’s completely intact, NPCs are the same and everything, they just added a bit of smoke coming out the volcano in the distance.

[NecroMorrius]

 

I’ve uninstalled it now but that sounds funny. 

[teddymeow]

Finished this last night after getting it for free on PS+ last month.

 

I "enjoyed" it? I'm not sure. I mean, it must have been moderately entertaining for me to have played it to completion. There were times when I wondered if I was playing a swimming game though.

 

Graphically (running performance mode  backwards compatible on PS5) it looked really nice! Some great lighting and water effects at times.

 

Acting, story were both shonky as hell and Jonah continues to call her "Laura".

 

Controls decide that they don't want to work at times meaning many falls when the grapple wouldn't engage. It's like the devs wanted you to see their animations. 

 

Lots of stuff ripped from other games. There's even a point where the main baddie asks Lara how many she has killed on her journey which just made me think of Uncharted 2.

 

Oddly, I'd happily go back in after a while and try to find the remaining tombs / challenges and possibly even get the DLC when it goes back on sale - missed it at £3.99 in the recent sale.

 

So, nowhere near as bad as the Edge 4 it received but the weakest of the reboot trilogy by a long way. I finished the 2013 reboot on both PS3 and Xbox 360 and the Definitive Edition and Rise on both PS4 and Xbox One so I think I can call myself a fan of the reboot stuff. 

 

Flat. Yeah, that's the feeling I would use to sum up how I feel about this. A middling 6 / 10.

 

 

[ryodi]

Finally finished the game and the additional dlc tombs. The gameplay itself is fine and while the story is terrible my main issue with the game and 2013 trilogy as a whole is that Lara is no fun at all.  I can understand that when it comes to the first game but in Rise and Shadow she still sounds bored and it doesn't help that her least interesting friend Jonah is the only one still with her. Hopefully if the series ever comes back Lara sounds like she's having as much fun as Keeley Hawes Lara did in the first Crystal Dynamics trilogy. 

 

I'd rank the trilogy Rise > 2013 > Shadow. They are similar but the open world in Shadow and characters within it are just awful and three games in Trinity just seem to be an even less competent version of the Templars from AC. 

[hmm]

I realise it's already been mentioned at least once in this thread but the Lara death sequences in this are utterly horrifying. Apart from anything else, they seem so wildly incongruous in the game as a whole. It might be generally aiming for serious and gritty, and I'm hardly blind to the numerous other problematic elements, but there doesn't seem to be much else, at least so far, that's especially gratuitous and yet the failure cutscenes are this endless parade of lingering, almost gleeful close-ups of brutal deaths from spikes, metal pipes, rocks, snakes, hyenas, piranhas, ... Did they outsource these to the Mortal Kombat guys or something?

 

This is merely the second most offensive thing in the game after the environment navigation, of course.

[peeveen]

I played through this recently and thought it was fairly average, but had to laugh at

Spoiler

the diminutive Lara with the Oxfordshire accent passing herself off as a herculean Aztec temple guard, simply with the help of a handy disguise.

 

Generally, I don't give two hoots about the story in videogames, but that really took the biscuit. Someone actually got paid real money to come up with that.

[hmm]

On a vaguely similar note, it was pretty funny to be given the option to increase atmosphere and immersion by having incidental NPCs all talk in their native languages, only for Lara to continue to conduct her half of the conversations in cut-glass accented English. Perhaps she should be saying it all A BIT LOUDER for the full effect.

[Xipe Totec]

I have this near the top of my digital Pile Of Shame, having recently played through ROTTR and surprised myself by having a great time. After hating the reboot (little more than relentless murdery, shooty horror-porn crap, as I remember) I'd ignored both sequels, but I picked up Rise for a fiver a few months ago because, well - it was a fiver.

 

Having skimmed through this thread I'm no longer sure dropping a whole £8 on Shadow is going to repeat that experience - I'm encouraged by less shooting, more exploring & more puzzles but it's hard not to get the impression that despite that, they've somehow managed to make the entire game into a gigantic, risible pile of arse.

 

And will I be endlessly infuriated by the conflation of Maya & Inca culture - two unrelated civilisations separated by several thousand miles and about five centuries? I was OK (if mildly confused) with an American-speaking hippie commune located in an inexplicably warm & sunny valley in Siberia, but messing with classic Mesoamerica might be a bit much.

[FishyFish]

There were some oddly disturbing bits in the game, I thought Not sure we need spoilers after this amount of time, but as @Xipe Totec might be playing it soon, I'll hide them just in case.

 

There was the bit where...

Spoiler

During the Lara-triggered tsunami when an entire town is being wiped off the map, they decide to increase the shock-value to 11 by showing a terrified child fall to its death in an inferno. I thought Lara might be able to save them but, nope.)

 

And then...

 

Spoiler

Lara's jolly hockeysticks childhood memory in the Harry-Potter mansion of secrets comes to abrupt end when her father - her sole remaining parent - blows his brains out!

 

Were they trying to be edgy and "adult" with the game, or just deliberately crass?

[Paulando]

“I played through this 30+ hour game that I hated and was very average but it was free and the story was rubbish and it was super easy.”

 

Why the fuck did you all finish it then? 😂

[PikaStu]

This was £8 or so on Steam so I thought I’d take a punt at it.

It looks lovely in ultra wide with RT shadows etc… and I’m enjoying the game. Sure the acting and story is all a bit arse, but the locations are pretty and the bow is still an awesome weapon.
It’s more of the same, it’s been a couple of years since I completed RotT, so it’s pretty much what I wanted. It’s a cheesy violent 80s action movie in game form, with some Donkey Kong 64 style loot-hunting on the side. 

[Fry Crayola]

21 hours ago, Paulando said:

Why the fuck did you all finish it then? 😂

 

I'm stubborn!

 

In fairness, it's mechanically quite fun - its flaws for me are mostly with its grim atmosphere, and uncomfortable white saviour narrative. That, and the enemies that rush you when Lara can't do close quarters at all.

 

Rise remains the best of the three, I really liked that one.

[Paulando]

Yeah, Rise was great. Loved the snowy environments too.

 

I thought Shadow was its best with the combat difficulty on the lowest, and the puzzle/environment difficulty set to the hardest, without that silly white paint everywhere. I enjoyed the puzzles and platforming, and finding the secrets, but it’s definitely flawed and the worst of the three.

[Hexx]

This is such an odd game. 

 

There's really not a good mix of combat/exploration - it's pretty much all the later. 

I can buy perks to recover arrows from bodies (so many resources so uneeded) or to Batman rope enemies from trees stealthily - but so far (about 8 hours/40% in) there's been absolutely no need to. I can think of maybe 1 situation where I could do the later. And I can only think of a handful of encounters anyway.

 

It's a beautiful game but the "mix" just feels way off.

[Kayin Amoh]

I got this free and just getting around to downloading it. I do hear that the story's silly as hell, and it's not as enjoyable as the first two from the new series, but eh. Worth a crack.

[Paulando]

The story is junk in all Tomb Raider games  I love them all but I always skip the story bits. I recommend setting the puzzle/environment difficulty to hard (which removes the hints), and setting the combat to whichever you fancy (I put it on easy).

 

It’s definitely the worst of the three, but it has its moments, and I’m just a sucker for anything Tomb Raider. Nothing quite like it for me.

[JamesC]

I got this game for my birthday in December and completed it a couple of weeks ago. I really enjoyed it. 

I don't really like all the machine gun stuff, that's not what I'm looking for in a Tomb Raider game, so I enjoyed this less combat focused installment. 

There were loads of Tombs and places to explore and lots of swimming and climbing which I really enjoyed. 

I can see why people who enjoy the big gun fights might have been a bit disappointed though. 

 

In terms of graphics, it looked great to me. All current gen games look great to me. I don't think I'm very discerning. 

[Hexx]

I was happily 100% areas but then I looked at achievements (which look a right bum ache and ill-calibrated with like...4 combat encounters in the game).

Given perks seem fairly pointless too might just push main quest