If you enjoyed the other games in the Survivor Trilogy, you’ll feel right at home in Shadow of the Tomb Raider. By taking inspiration from older games in the series, Shadow exceeds 2013 and Rise with its amazing setting to explore and a more capable & confident Lara Croft. However, it is severely dragged down by a lacking story and major pacing issues.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider goes on sale regularly and is well worth the discounted price.

Shadow’s main setting, the Jungles of Peru, is by far its biggest strength. It's so rich with detail, with tons of animals scurrying around the lush foliage. Paired with amazing ambience sounds and an energetic soundtrack, Peru is one of the best locations to explore in the series.

The tombs in Shadow are another home run, each one contains an in depth puzzle, often wrapped in an exciting central theme. I particularly enjoyed the over the top spectacle of the DLC tombs, but the Cenote tomb was a personal favourite. There's still a variety of collectables beyond tombs, all of which enhance Lara’s abilities and make the jungle so exciting to navigate.

While it's a shame there's almost no new traversal upgrades, having all of your equipment early keeps environments open and encourages heading off the main path at your own leisure.

The one drawback of Shadow’s environments are its populated areas. These areas, while incredibly detailed, just aren’t as interesting to explore, and place annoying limitations on your weapons and outfits. Missions in these areas often involve a lot of wooden dialogue, and are never as captivating as exploring abandoned ruins.

Unfortunately, most elements of Shadow’s story are underwhelming. Lara begins her adventure searching for “the box that can remake the world,” a vague Macguffin that lacks emotional investment. A horrible burden is placed on Lara, which the game fails to thoroughly explore, resulting in some bizarre whiplash that ruins the game's pivotal story scenes.

Our villain, Dr. Dominguez has very little time to develop an antagonistic relationship with Lara, and barely feels connected to the Trinity from the last game. The allies fare slightly better, but Lara and Dominguez’s relationships with the hidden city feel too simplistic. The DLC’s do a decent job fleshing these relationships out, but it's still not nearly enough to feel compelling.

The silver lining is Lara, who finally feels like the iconic Tomb Raider. It's great to see her solving riddles and courageously facing down villains. The game also gives Jonah time to shine and explores his friendship with Lara which I loved, as he is one of the strongest aspects of the Survivor games.

The thorough outfit and weapon customisation for Lara is great, it gives the player a personal flair and matches her equipment to the jungle setting. With such focus on Lara’s power, the gruesome death animations of the Survivor games are more dehumanising than ever. Doubling down on exploiting Lara’s pain for shock value definitely should’ve been avoided.

Shadow’s combat is surprisingly infrequent. This is great for fans who want to focus on the exploration and puzzles, but it's quite strange just how few fights there are, when most of the collectables involve upgrading Lara's arsenal and abilities.

Maybe Lara should’ve only had her bow for this adventure. There are several sections where you lose your firearms, or fight enemies that only have bows. There’s a clear focus on Lara’s stealth and craftiness that could’ve been pushed so much further.

When you do get the chance to fight, it feels pretty good! It’s very similar to the previous survivor games, but the new skills and ammo provide just enough exciting ways to take on enemies. The best all out gun fights are found in the DLC missions, although I would suggest avoiding the DLC guns, they are quite overpowered.

The best new feature is the enhanced stealth, Lara can now hide in foliage and cover herself in mud. It gives combat this “jungle predator” theme, which is a whole other flavour of fun, although the AI is far too easy to fool. I love how Lara feels like a tactical badass, but not quite the full on action hero she will soon become.

In Tomb Raider, I generally prefer the environments & Lara of the PS2 titles, but the gameplay loop of the survivor games. Shadow of the Tomb Raider, is a very good bridge between these two trilogies. Despite its many failings, it left me quite excited for the series’ future.

This game is barely worth it even on a 90% discount.

- Story makes no sense at all;
- Movement is janky and slow;
- Gunplay is just terrible and you can forget about stealthy bow and arrows headshots. Every enemy has more armor on their head than a WW2 tank to the point where even a maxed out rifle can't one-shot those;
- The DLC content is arduous at best and the items you get from the get-go are just overpowered;

All in all it has none of the charm the first of the reboot games had and none of the polish the second one did. It's a jumbled mess that only has graphical fidelity going for it.

Really like the graphics of this game also the special effects and music gives immersive experience while playing.

Beautiful looking game but suffers from a mediocre story. More of the same if you're already familiar with the other games in the trilogy.

If you purchase the definitive edition, it includes seven additional tombs in the DLC. You can access these tombs through side missions in the game or play them separately from the main menu. Completing the tombs through side missions adds some story to the DLC tombs.

my ratings - 8/10 (survived for environment and graphics🙂)

i played the rise of tomb raider and i gotta say this is an amazing improved game! i love the animations, the gunplay and also the story of the game! the only troubles im facing is just how hard the puzzle is lmao and also, maybe turn off the aim assist to make it more fun to hit headshots! overall its a pretty decent game its worth my penny!

I really don't want to play this game again

After playing TR2013 and Rise in prep for my first time playing this, MAN it REALLY feels outsourced.

The story was never really a strong suit in the last two games, but they were at least servicable; this game is obsessed with annoyingly long cutscenes filled with conversations composed entirely of expositing things that you really don't need to know. Heck, the game starts you off ultra-stupid with the inciting incident being so insanely absurd, that it entirely mismatches in tone with the last two games (despite supernatural elements being present in both).

The world feels both lacking in content, and so dense with explorable things that I can't get a gauge on whether I'm overwhelmed or underwhelmed; It often feels like everything in the game feels concentrated in one area (The Hidden City).

Some voice acting is really good, Jonah's actor KILLS IT in this game... but then the game will take Lara's obnoxious hints and play them over and over and over again until you turn off the dialogue and switch off subtitles. You can crank up the difficulty, but then you lose the survival instinct when searching for Survival Caches, Relics and Documents during Tomb exploration. In the end, you're either forced to listen to Lara remark on every single thing ever, or just have no additional direction for your own pace. It's either you get handheld to an obnoxious degree, or dropped off a cliff, no in-between.

One thing that truly upsets me to no end is how butchered the movement felt. Sometimes, Lara will grapple onto a hook so far up she'll get forced up into the air to cross a path, and other times, she'll not connect with something right in front of her face. If you hold one direction and jump, then switch to a new direction and jump, there's like a 1/6 chance that Lara will not register your direction change and just fling herself off a cliff in the direction of the last movement option. Sometimes, animations will cancel during a climb or grapple, and you'll plummet to your death for no reason. My personal favourite is when you grapple onto a craggy wall with your axe, and as you're climbing up, Lara decides that the rope is too weak (I guess) as it vanishes into thin air, resulting in a plummet to your death

Visual clarity is also a total mess with this game. There's this ugly piss filter that's present in basically every section of the game, and if not yellow, green. Normally, I'd be alright with it: it establishes atmosphere. Except, in this case, it makes being able to discern where you can actually climb infinitely harder. There were times where a puzzle was as simple as climbing a wall, and I had no idea I could climb the wall since the yellow textures on yellow filter blended together to an extent where I couldn't discern ANYTHING. There's so much clutter, and it all blends together into texture soup. I never struggled with discerning where to climb in any Tomb Raider game like this one.

I speculate that much of this crap comes from the game's outsourcing to Eidos while Crystal Dynamics worked on Avengers. This game certainly feels like it wasn't made by CD, even with the shared engine and assets. The narrative is boring and is paced horribly with the gameplay (something I never felt with the last two games); Features dropped from TR2013 to Rise return in this game only to be BARELY utilised (rope ascender is used to open like 3 doors in the whole game).

I truly, TRULY hate this game.

where the hell is the next one!!!!

Awesome af but my least favorite out of the new 3

It is the weakest of the new trilogy. I felt the story was not great and i had to force myself to finish it. get this game on a sale. It also felt a bit grindy. Worth a sale but not as good as the first two.

*sharp inhale* impossible :c. Can't carry any more

I've always liked the Tomb Raider Games