I enjoyed the Tombs, especially, which are scattered generously around the world and offer fun and sometimes lengthy distractions with brain-teasing puzzles. The level design will be familiar to anybody that’s played the previous two games, but this time Eidos Montreal & Crystal Dynamics have taken things a step further with Crypts, Tombs, Monoliths, and all manner of documents, murals, and relics to locate and collect. There really is a wealth of content to explore, with dozens of optional areas that branch off from the game’s main hubs. That’s a good thing, too, because you’ll be doing a great deal of traversing the great outdoors and exploring ancient ruins in Shadow of the Tomb Raider. But it certainly feels no less gratifying to pull off. It’s nothing that I haven’t seen before, though, it has to be said. There’s a skill to swinging from point to point with the grappling axe, dangling inverted from rocky cliff-faces, and saving her from countless crumbling ledges. Traversal is once again top-notch, challenging players to master much more than just holding a button to grapple and leap between traversable surfaces. However, it’s in the jungle that Shadow of the Tomb Raider not only looks the best but feels so wonderful to play. It’s dark and shocking at times, and there’s a sense of desperation in the urgency of Lara and best friend Jonah’s plight. It’s all very high-stakes stuff, and much of Lara’s character development throughout the game centers around her coming to terms with taking responsibility for her actions and dealing with the consequences of her behavior.
Shadow of the tomb raider review series#
She’s given a major reality check early into Shadow of the Tomb Raider’s story, however, as her lust for an ancient artifact leads her to unwittingly put into a motion a series of cataclysmic events that devastated an entire city, and actually threaten to destroy the world. She’s well and truly a hardened badass archeologist –young, but confident in her ability and matured from her experiences over the past two games. Lara Croft’s coming of age story is now officially over.
What was less clear, though, was just how much the experience was going to push beyond the familiarity of its formula to show me something new, and in doing so, elevate it beyond merely a great game to something truly excellent. After just a few hours of gameplay, I had no doubt in my mind that this is absolutely the most accomplished culmination of that design we’ve yet seen. Shadow of the Tomb Raider marks the third installment in the new rebooted series, and I was particularly keen to see how developers Eidos Montreal & Crystal Dynamics had iterated on the foundations of a formula it had first implemented so successfully five years ago. The gameplay mechanics and level design were also brilliant, modernizing the series with a blueprint that sought to balance exploration, puzzle-solving, and combat in a satisfying loop. It breathed life into a franchise that had felt increasingly dated. I adored its darker, grittier narrative direction and the decision to evolve Lara Croft into something deeper and more complex than her original 90s, impossibly proportioned fantasy design.
2013’s Tomb Raider reboot was one of my favorite games of the previous console generation.
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