Recent reviews by OverTone47

I had this game sitting in my library for almost an year since it was given away for free by Valve on Half-Life's 25th Anniversary.[www.half-life.com] Assuming the game to be dated in terms of gameplay didn't help it either. Fast-forward 11 months to October 2024, I download it on my system thinking "This game is ancient, it must be short, easy and unsophisticated compared to what games are today; I can play it once a while when I'm bored and need a device for a mindless time-pass"...and man, I couldn't have been any more wrong than that!

I played this game on the hardest difficulty, due to my assumptions as stated. While the story is relatively simpler, the enemies are extremely smart, be it the aliens or the human enemy (especially the human enemies!). With multiple varieties of weapons, and a fair variety of adversaries, the game did manage to engage me throughout the play-through (barring a few chapters towards the end). The sound design is decent enough to be serviceable even today and the music, though few and far between the chapters, is good. The chapters themselves have enough variety to avoid repetitiveness. The game also employs clever use of simple physics, which for the time it was developed in, made this game first-of-its-kind and more sophisticated.

This is not just another 'Run-and-Gun' game from that era, but actually a 'Run-Think-Shoot-Live' one, living up to its tagline. Really looking forward to playing HL 2, which again, was given away for free by Lord GabeN, on Half-Life 2's 20th Anniversary![www.half-life.com]

Almost 11 years of playing this game & being a pro, I can confirm it is indeed a poggers game.

EDIT: They rolled-out Counter-Strike 2 today and deleted all my 167 achievements I spent hundreds of hours on to 100% CS:GO. :(

Shadow of the Tomb Raider, or the entire Tomb Raider reboot trilogy for that matter, is such an extremely lazy & bad attempt from the publisher, Square Enix, that it makes it almost apparent that they decided to just ride the hype and legacy of the Tomb Raider games for their sales of the trilogy.
The only feeling I have after 100%-ing this game is that of jade and joylessness.

Story-
The story is atrociously bad; it's so ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ pathetic which, when coupled with horrendous delivery of each and every character you'll interact with in the game, makes the journey irritating and extremely boring from the very beginning. I fail to understand how did any of the script writers at Eidos-Montreal read the dialogues and said "yes, this looks good enough. This is what we are going ahead with. People will love this...". Forget about liking any (and I am not exaggerating) of the dialogues, they are so ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ lame that it's not serviceable for any game being released in this era of gaming where we have hundreds of games each year flooding the market and the option of picking a better game over a bad one has never been more accessible. The story, along with it's dialogues and characters, do not justify being a AAA studio production that had millions of dollars from a well-established publisher.
All the characters are dislikeable, especially the protagonist, Lara Croft. She's has the worst personality and is a sociopathic self-centered ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, with just a motive to finger the ass of each and every tomb and cave on the planet without any meaning to any of it. This game is so bad it's not even laughable, since it tries so hard to maintain the undertone of some serious and important world-saving crusade by Croft.

Combat-
The combat and stealth mechanics are the best of this Tomb Raider trilogy (like it should be). Your best pick will be the bow since the guns are far less effective and are clunky to some extent.
As a matter of fact, I am actually glad Eidos-Montreal decided to focus more on actual tomb-raiding and not going ham on the Call of Duty way like the previous two games in the trilogy. There is a significant increase number of tombs, puzzles or challenges (in the campaign or DLC) which are nicely done and lesser combat sequences from the previous two games.

Exploration/Tombs/Puzzles-
The main game tombs/challenges are just okay-ish, however, the DLC/optional tombs and puzzles are where the game can be fun; they are good enough for a Tomb Raider game, and almost at par with quality of those in Uncharted.

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Overall, the side content and DLC is not enough to mask the lame-ness of the campaign's story and worse-than-generic characters and dialogues, and it is not recommended that you purchase the game. I am not even jealous of those guys who claimed the entire trilogy games for free on the Epic Games Store during their December '21 giveaway, but rather feel happy for those who liked the games and sad that I wasted my money on these games at all, because none of the three games are a good experience.

IMO, It's good that Square Enix decided to sell their western studios to Embracer Group as there is a possibility these studios end up making better quality games under the new management and breathe a new life to the Tomb Raider and the dead Deus-Ex IPs, both of which have suffered injustice at the hands of Square Enix.

Almost a decade old game, still has the potential to awe, at least when it comes to the storytelling. Well-written dialogues along with solid delivery throughout the story. Also, the sound-score of this game is under-appreciated IMO. This game is relatively short, with one playthrough to last about 7-9 hours.

Choices and their impact -
The choices do not affect the story in any way (except in the last chapter) and are rather used to put the player in the shoes of Martin Walker, the protagonist(?). It's up to you to explore the options since the choices are not always apparent. Also, they subtly impact Walker's relation with his teammates as the story progresses which is reflected through some dialogue exchanges amongst them.

Combat -
Probably the weakest element of the game. You have the same input button for taking cover and sprinting, which may cause you to accidentally take cover when you want to sprint past a cover. Same problem with the vault/melee since there's one button for it.
The cover mechanics are clunky. The character's hit-box sometimes is not fully covered when you take a cover and can still take damage if you're on the edge of some covers. This is extremely irritating when you're playing on FUBAR difficulty where it takes just three standard bullets for Walker to die...more than what it takes for the enemy to die. Also, ammo availability is not abundant, so keep that in mind. Advisable to train yourself to take quick aim for the headshots when playing on lower difficulties, because it's the most efficient way if you're gonna go for that FUBAR difficulty achievement.
Sometimes, I wonder if the developers deliberately designed the game in such a way that we, as the players, leave the game mid-way due to the clunky feel of it so that we do not get to discover what actually the story has in store for us.

Get it on a good sale maybe and you'll like the game experience; mostly because you'll experience something fresh - other than the "♥♥♥♥ YEAH! AMERICA IS THE BEST!!" or a typical cliche story with a happy ending - and most of all, the balls and audacity what once the media had back in the day when they could tell a solid story to the masses without worrying about the SJW squad or being politically appeasing/diplomatic.