Shadow of the Tomb Raider is an action-adventure video game developed by Eidos Montréal in conjunction with Crystal Dynamics and published by Square Enix. It continues the narrative from the 2015 game Rise of the Tomb Raider and is the twelfth mainline entry in the Tomb Raider series. The game was released worldwide on 14 September 2018 for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, with a further release on macOS and Linux set for 2019.
Set shortly after the events of Rise of the Tomb Raider, its story follows Lara Croft as she ventures through Mesoamerica and South America to the legendary city Paititi, battling the paramilitary organization Trinity and racing to stop a Mayan apocalypse she has unleashed. Lara must traverse the environment and combat enemies with firearms and stealth as she explores semi-open hubs. In these hubs she can raid challenge tombs to unlock new rewards, complete side missions, and scavenge for resources which can be used to craft useful materials.
Development began in 2015 following the completion of Rise of the Tomb Raider, lasting until July 2018. Shadow of the Tomb Raider was designed to conclude Lara's journey begun in the 2013 reboot, with a key theme being descent both through the jungle environment and into her personality. The setting and narrative was based on Mayan and Aztec mythologies, consulting historians to design the architecture and people of Paititi. The gameplay was adjusted based on both fan feedback and the wishes of Eidos Montréal, incorporating swimming and grappling while increasing difficulty tailoring. Camilla Luddington returned to provide voice and motion-capture work for Lara.
Gameplay:
Shadow of the Tomb Raider is an action-adventure game played from a third-person perspective; players take the role of main protagonist Lara Croft as she explores environments across the continent of South America. The game's hub is set to be the largest in the franchise which also reveals the hidden city of Paititi. Players can participate in side quests and missions and learn about Paititi which provides a richer experience. A new barter system allows players to trade resources, salvage parts and weapons in Paititi. There are numerous adjustments made to gameplay, which is otherwise identical to Rise. The controls for swimming have been completely revised, as Lara is now able to hold her breath underwater for a longer period of time due to the introduction of air pockets. She also gains the ability to rappel down a cliff using a rope. Stealth becomes an important part of the game, with Lara being able to disengage from combat when she escapes from enemies' line of sight by covering herself in mud, hiding in bushes or against walls.
Like its predecessors, the game allows players to hunt wild animals, craft materials using the resources collected, solve puzzles and explore optional tombs. The game also features more tombs than the previous installments in the reboot series. Players will now have the option to tailor their gameplay experience as exploration, puzzles and combat have their own difficulty settings. A new Immersion Mode enables players to hear the background conversations of the locals in their native languages, when turned off the conversations are made in the players' chosen voice over language. - Wikipedia
Plot:
In the two months since Rise of the Tomb Raider, Lara Croft (Camilla Luddington) and her friend Jonah Maiava (Earl Baylon) have dedicated themselves to stopping the activities of paramilitary organization Trinity. The two track a cell to Cozumel in Mexico that is led by Pedro Dominguez (Carlos Leal), the head of Trinity's High Council. Slipping inside nearby tombs being excavated by Trinity, Lara discovers a temple containing the Dagger of Ix Chel and references to a hidden city. Murals adorning the walls allude to the Silver Box of Chak Chel and warn of "the Cleansing", a Mayan apocalypse culminating in a permanent solar eclipse. Lara ignores the warnings and takes the Dagger to prevent Trinity from acquiring it. Dominguez catches her and reveals that by taking the Dagger, Lara has triggered the Cleansing. He takes the Dagger, intending to unite it with the Box to stop the Cleansing and use the power it grants him to remake the world in his image. Lara and Jonah escape a tsunami that destroys Cozumel and foreshadows the coming apocalypse.
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| Shadow of the Tomb Raider doesn't skip a beat when it comes to the action-packed set pieces that this reboot trilogy is known for. |
Lara infiltrates the cult's temple and overhears Amaru telling Unuratu that the Box was hidden by Andres Lopez, a missionary sent to Paititi by Trinity during the Spanish conquest of South America. Lara rescues Urunatu and realises that Amaru does not fully understand the ritual: the power of Kukulkan is not enough to prevent the apocalpyse; rather, the ritual sacrifices Kukulkan to prevent it. Unuratu is shot by Commander Rourke, Amaru's second in command. Before she dies, Unuratu implores Lara to complete the ritual, but warns her to not let the Box influence her. Lara and Jonah are attacked by Rourke and separated as they leave Paititi to decipher the next clue. Believing Jonah to be dead, Lara goes on a rampage that destroys an oil refinery and slaughters everyone there except Rourke, who escapes. She momentarily breaks down when she finds Jonah alive, but he manages to calm her down and they decipher the Box's location. Driven mad by the Box's influence, Lopez established a mission near Paititi where he trained acolytes to complete the ritual. Lara and Jonah find a secret catacomb beneath a church that leads to Lopez's tomb and the Box. Amaru finds them and forces Lara to surrender the Box. He admits that he ordered her father's death to prevent him from finding Paititi and revealing it to the world. Lara tries to persuade Amaru to use the Cleansing ritual to benefit the world. He refuses, as the Cleansing will only affect Paititi. Amaru has used his position in Trinity to manipulate them into preventing it. He leaves Lara and Jonah to escape the third cataclysm, a massive earthquake that causes a landslide and destroys the mission.
Back in Paititi, Lara and Jonah help the newly-crowned Etzli lead an assault on an underground temple complex at Paititi's center. They plan to disrupt Amaru's ceremony while avoiding the fourth and final cataclysm, a volcanic eruption that will destroy the city. Lara is forced to go on alone when Trinity cuts off Etzli's forces. She encounters the Yaaxil and their leader Crimson Fire and convinces them to help her stop Amaru. Lara takes on the symbolic role of Ix Chel while Crimson Fire is Chak Chel. While the Yaaxil kill Rourke and the Trinity High Council, Lara makes it to the temple summit. She fails to stop Amaru from piercing the Box and absorbing Kukulkan's power as the sun is blocked by an eclipse. Lara overpowers Amaru after a lengthy battle; accepting defeat, he transfers Kukulkan's power to Lara as he dies. True to Unuratu's warning, she is tempted to use the Box to revive her parents, but instead lets "Chak Chel" symbolically stab her as "Ix Chel". This sacrifices Kukulkan's spirit and stops the Cleansing. In the aftermath, Unuratu is laid to rest and Jonah decides to take a vacation. Lara stays in Paititi to help Etzli restore the city to its former glory. A post-credits scene shows Lara planning her next adventure at Croft Manor, acknowledging that her role is not to solve the world's mysteries, but to protect them.
The Verdict:
I honestly had to go back and re-read my reviews on the last two outings in Square Enix's reboot of the Tomb Raider franchise. I picked this up as a weekend Redbox rental and completed the main campaign and majority of the side quests/optional tombs done with about 78% completion within the span of a weekend. This review will be strictly focused on the single player campaign.Right off the bat, I have to say that this game is a major setback in terms of gameplay compared to Rise of the Tomb Raider. In that review, I mentioned how I loved that Lara started off with everything from the initial quest in this reboot trilogy and they didn't pull a Metroid/Castlevania where you trip up or something of that matter where it causes you to lose all of your abilities/weapons. In the introduction section of the game, you have all of Lara's equipment and weapons from Rise but you find yourself once arriving to the main South American focused part of the game that Lara is stripped of all of her equipment due to an abrupt plane crash landing and you have to acquire everything all over again. I felt that this was completely unnecessary and felt like poor design in terms of depowering Lara like this all over again. They could have made the excuse of that she didn't bring all of her combat equipment from her last adventure, but to even script her down of her traversal options (climbing gear until much later in the game along with the fully upgraded bow, that was your meat and bones in the previous two games in terms of survival equipment, and the climbing axe to name a few) and bring her back down to basics for this last hurrah felt like a major step backwards in comparison from coming from Rise to this one. My only explanation for that from what I can assume is that they wanted to throttle back on how "powerful" Lara came across in her last adventure. Gameplay had her as a walking weapon of mass-destruction in Rise and I guess they wanted to scale that back a bit, despite the developers crediting that they were influenced by the Rambo films when approaching this title.
Don't get me wrong. I did have fun playing this game, even though there were a lot of moments where it felt more tedious than what the previous outings felt like. There were far too many fetch quests this time around for meager to "okay" rewards, but I felt inclined to do most of the optional tombs and hidden crypts because they always had an otherwise impossible to acquire new ability on the skill tree or part of survival outfit that I would want to better utilize Lara's skills that I was using. While I enjoyed the increased number of optional tombs and the addition of hidden crypts in this sequel, I never felt like they were as well thought out nor as captivating as the ones in the previous two games in this reboot trilogy. It felt like during the first two-thirds of the game, you were fighting nothing more than the wilderness and own survival instincts while sneaking around tombs and catacombs. The last third of the game throws stealth section after stealth section at you with a few action set pieces that even Rambo and Michael Bay would blush at from the sheer amount of explosions going off in the environment and tactic prowess required by Lara to survive these ordeals.
I felt the underwater sections were a little hit or miss. A lot of them felt forced on the gameplay in a few moments while others fit with the natural exploration of the environment. The constant threat of maintaining Lara's limited air supply while evading underwater predators (namely piranhas and electric eels) kept these moments tense, but they never felt cheap in my honest opinion from the few times I did occur a death or two in these sequences. I thought it was rather silly that you have next to no means of combating these underwater threats. Even in the original series back on the original PlayStation, Lara could at least arm herself with a bow gun to deal with those threats. I guess Square Enix said you had enough weapons to juggle in this game, no need to muddle up the weapon wheel with one more.
Speaking of the weapon wheel, I have a minor complaint. You can craft items on the fly for use in combat/stealth, but here's my major problem with it. Lara crafts these items very, very slowly. After playing games like Horizon Zero Dawn and Monster Hunter World, where this process is almost instant and second nature, it just comes across as cumbersome and poorly executed in this game. To say this game encourages you to craft so much stuff, they sure give you a lot of junk in terms of materials to use as resources, but at the same time, you generally have more than you need unless you're hoarding out on resources for your weapon upgrades. Upgraded item pouches for more storage space for these precious resources tend to be the first obvious choice to purchase from the in-game vendors, but those tend to get full pretty fast as well.
The story comes across as a muddled mess, even though they had some pretty good intentions even though the execution was poor. The core emotional dilemma that Lara Croft has to deal with in this game is the consequences of disturbing all of these ancient artifacts and the impact and potential destruction of the cultures that hidden them away in the first place. For the first portion of the game, it seems like Lara Croft has learned her lesson after seeing what her tomb raiding has done in the opening act of the game, but her desire for stopping Trinity once and for all and avenging her father's death drives her to seemingly put those concerns on the backseat for the greater good.
There's an excellent flashback section of the game, where players are tasked with exploring the Croft mansion while playing as Lara when she was young child. You start off in the courtyard and playground before making your way through the hedge maze, solving puzzles along the way. You get a sample of where Lara's knack for climbing and traversing all types of surfaces comes from before landing into a hidden room of the Croft mansion where all of the artifacts and treasures that Lara's father has discovered are stored for save keeping. If you didn't pay attention to the clues that Lara comes across on the way getting here that mention her mother and her internal dialogue(s), then this puzzle isn't going to be fun at all, but if you did, then this is a rather pleasant distraction from roaming around the jungles and tombs of South America.
The middle section of the narrative has Lara be accepted as a refugee within the hidden city of Patiti, where the leader of Trinity (Amaru) has been masquerading as their false leader. She befriends Unuratu after saving her son on the outskirts of the city from Trinity soldiers attempting to find the ruins to bring forth some mythical apocalypse. From information given to her from Unuratu, she finds the artifact that Trinity was looking for and ends up giving up to Trinity to save her friend Jonah's life. Obviously, it comes down to Lara messing up another culture by potentially unleashing another apocalyptic catastrophe onto the world. In the game's finale, Lara finds herself dealing with another supernatural threat to end this trilogy and to stop Trinity once and for all. Yeah... by the end of the game, it feels like the writers were retreading familiar territory and just completely lost sight of Lara's whole mental dilemma of disturbing/destroying hidden cultures and civilizations by uncovering ancient artifacts. I get it though. They wanted to close the book on the loose ends that they left on the table concerning her father being killed by Trinity and grant Lara some sort of closure by allowing her to avenge his death. The story ends with the leader of Trinity falling at Lara's hand and another global crisis has been adverted, but at the same time, it seems that Square Enix left the door open if they wanted to do more with Lara Croft in this reboot series. I personally wouldn't mind another game in this reboot series, only if they took the time to carefully plan it out and not go for a cash grab, hot off the tails of that live-action film that tanked earlier this year. On top of that, I wouldn't want them to repeat the same formula narrative-wise for the fourth game in a row either.
Off-topic, but... I hate to ask but is Lara Croft supposed to be understood as bisexual in this reboot? I mentioned it back in the original title that I thought there was more than a friendship going on between Lara and Sam. Most of Rise was focused on Jonah and Lara globe-trotting together, but they are clearly more friends than anything more - this sequel sets that fact into stone during the opening moments of this game rather quickly, especially once they land into the first major town in South America where Jonah meets his not-so-subtle love interest. That's where their relationship draws the line it seems between Lara and Jonah as he's there to keep her grounded. Maybe I was reading a bit too into it, but it seemed like the more Unuratu bonded in their quest to stop Trinity and stop Amaru, Lara's body language seemed more "fond" of her in terms of companionship. I could have easily misread that as mutual respect between them, but if it was meant to be the former then I think that would have been an interesting take on Lara Croft's sexuality in this reboot. Since the initial outing in 2013, I haven seen this iteration of Lara Croft as a woman forced to rise to the challenge of the circumstances and challenges/obstacles around here. That is what has molded her into the woman, or rather the heroine, she is today at the end of this trilogy. It wouldn't be far-fetched to see her having a sense of fondness or rather admiration (or could be read as mutual respect as I mentioned earlier) in another woman that she sees as her equal, forced to rise to challenges in her own life and society - in this case being Unuratu. Enough of me trying to play the psychological analytic on this review...
Following the Game Awards last week, Square Enix is hosting a special promotion that is allowing players on PlayStation 4 to try out the game as free trial/demo for a limited time. I honestly say take advantage of this free trial and use it as your means to see if the game is worth your hard earned cash or not. I believe the trial allows you to play through the first major/introductory tomb, so you'll definitely get your feet wet in terms of gameplay in more ways than one.
One thing I didn't get to dabble before taking my Redbox rental back was the three new playstyles that are unlocked once you complete the game for the first time. According to the in-game text, you can restart the game on New Game+ with all of your skills, resources, and weapons carrying over, but you will have your skills tailored for the one specific playstyle that you choose at the start of the game.
There's an excellent flashback section of the game, where players are tasked with exploring the Croft mansion while playing as Lara when she was young child. You start off in the courtyard and playground before making your way through the hedge maze, solving puzzles along the way. You get a sample of where Lara's knack for climbing and traversing all types of surfaces comes from before landing into a hidden room of the Croft mansion where all of the artifacts and treasures that Lara's father has discovered are stored for save keeping. If you didn't pay attention to the clues that Lara comes across on the way getting here that mention her mother and her internal dialogue(s), then this puzzle isn't going to be fun at all, but if you did, then this is a rather pleasant distraction from roaming around the jungles and tombs of South America.
The middle section of the narrative has Lara be accepted as a refugee within the hidden city of Patiti, where the leader of Trinity (Amaru) has been masquerading as their false leader. She befriends Unuratu after saving her son on the outskirts of the city from Trinity soldiers attempting to find the ruins to bring forth some mythical apocalypse. From information given to her from Unuratu, she finds the artifact that Trinity was looking for and ends up giving up to Trinity to save her friend Jonah's life. Obviously, it comes down to Lara messing up another culture by potentially unleashing another apocalyptic catastrophe onto the world. In the game's finale, Lara finds herself dealing with another supernatural threat to end this trilogy and to stop Trinity once and for all. Yeah... by the end of the game, it feels like the writers were retreading familiar territory and just completely lost sight of Lara's whole mental dilemma of disturbing/destroying hidden cultures and civilizations by uncovering ancient artifacts. I get it though. They wanted to close the book on the loose ends that they left on the table concerning her father being killed by Trinity and grant Lara some sort of closure by allowing her to avenge his death. The story ends with the leader of Trinity falling at Lara's hand and another global crisis has been adverted, but at the same time, it seems that Square Enix left the door open if they wanted to do more with Lara Croft in this reboot series. I personally wouldn't mind another game in this reboot series, only if they took the time to carefully plan it out and not go for a cash grab, hot off the tails of that live-action film that tanked earlier this year. On top of that, I wouldn't want them to repeat the same formula narrative-wise for the fourth game in a row either.
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| (Laughs) You can't tell me something isn't going on between Lara and Unuratu when Lara's leaning in looking at her like this! |
Following the Game Awards last week, Square Enix is hosting a special promotion that is allowing players on PlayStation 4 to try out the game as free trial/demo for a limited time. I honestly say take advantage of this free trial and use it as your means to see if the game is worth your hard earned cash or not. I believe the trial allows you to play through the first major/introductory tomb, so you'll definitely get your feet wet in terms of gameplay in more ways than one.
One thing I didn't get to dabble before taking my Redbox rental back was the three new playstyles that are unlocked once you complete the game for the first time. According to the in-game text, you can restart the game on New Game+ with all of your skills, resources, and weapons carrying over, but you will have your skills tailored for the one specific playstyle that you choose at the start of the game.
Play It or Don't Bother?
Like I mentioned earlier in this review, this isn't a bad game; it just feels like one you've played twice already. If this was supposed to be Lara Croft's curtain call in terms of her outings in this reboot trilogy, then I'm sad to say that she went out on a rather mediocre note. Players that have stuck with Lara Croft's adventures thus far will feel right at home, but there's nothing revolutionary nor gamebreaking about this title. It just completes the journey that we started with Lara Croft back in 2013 and answers the remaining questions that were left unanswered since the beginning, while leaving a few new ones at the same time. Much like the last two outings in this reboot trilogy, this game warrants a bit of your gaming time, but I wouldn't go out of my way to play it, especially with so many AAA titles and blockbuster releases out at the moment. From what I've heard and read online, Square Enix already shaved the price down on this title multiple times since launch, especially on Steam, which didn't sit too well with early adopters right off the bat. Just like the previous outings in this reboot trilogy, I plan on picking it up down the road once all of the DLC is available off the season pass as the New Game+ content peaked my interest on how the multiple alternate playstyles would change things up gameplay-wise in subsequent playthroughs.
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