I played the remaster when it came to PS4 (didn't play the original on last-gen) and then played its sequel when it came to the Xbox One. I thought they were fine; they weren't superb but I liked two well enough to want the sequel. A lot of what I saw from the action though, how shooting feels or how 'smart' A.I. is as well as the possibility that the story and characters aren't that interesting, I decided not to get it. I am also unsure as to how varied or just how good the setting is which is important to me, but I'm thinking maybe I should just get it at some point and get through it? Some say it was better than the first two. What did you guys think? Where does it sit in comparison to the first two? I'll be getting it on the Xbox One X if I get it.

Uninspired

Lara is now completely unlikable, she gets nit sympathy from me (despite the gane desperate for it) i found myself frequently rooting for the villain

Best tombs but the combat and platformin feels off

Weird pacing and tonal shifts

As a game its fine and its on gamepass so its worth a play if you arent desperate to play anything else, but there is a good reason this game fell so far under the radar... its completely unremarkable. I loved the other 2

Felt rushed.. little to no originality. Pace was odd, the 'open world' wasn't great..

Disappointing game really and i was happy to be done with it, enjoyed the previous 2 as well.

I just started playing it and so far feels like a “more of the same” situation. Still get some really jaw breaking vistas from time to time but yah, kinda feels unnecessary.

Copied from my GOTY 2018 list

Shadow of the Tomb Raider (PS4) - Completed the story earlier today and overall I'd say Shadow of the Tomb Raider was underwhelming. A very good looking game at more than a handful of spots, and Paititi was definitely a very different city/hub type environment compared to what you see in most games these days, so that was a nice refreshing change.

The rest of it was lacking. In particular, I found Lara's voice work to be.. flat? Almost felt like the actress didn't want to be there. Most noticeable to me was when you'd examine various artifacts or notes found throughout your journey, to which there would be an accompanying vocal reading by Lara which, in every case I can remember, was entirely monotone and dead. There is also the neat feature of having localized voice overs: NPCs and characters speaking in their native tongue, except it feels weird and incomplete because they don't have Lara attempting to communicate with the same language. So you have Lara standing there talking in everyday English to some native, who then responds in Peruvian or whatever and has subtitles, and then Lara responds in English again. Not even attempting to simplify her sentences or words and no physical hand gestures to go along with it, as a person might do when trying to express something to someone when you don't speak their language. So while the option for "Immersive Language" seemed like a neat idea at first, I turned it off almost immediately. Too jarring.

Not much to be said about the rest of the game. Story felt somewhat irrelevant to me, but not as dumb as Rise of the Tomb Raider. I haven't played many of the Tomb Raider games, but Lara's backstory and all this Trinity stuff is entirely unnecessary to my enjoyment of this series. Just let me explore cool areas. Remove all the dumb gun fights and stuff. The climbing and level progression continues to feel very linear and a direct copy of Uncharted. Whole skill system felt pointless. I would just open it, stick some points in stuff I didn't care about, and then continue playing. None of the gear felt necessary to craft or purchase. You don't use the weapons very often. Again, all of that stuff is just excess baggage that the series doesn't need. All the animations seemed like they were under cooked, looking disjointed and janky at times. I always hated how you constantly make these huge leaps of faith and then you hit the button and her trajectory changes as she magnetizes to the appropriate ledge to grab. I did like having the options to make combat easy while making all the exploration and puzzles as difficult as possible, which is exactly what I did.

If *I* were to make a Tomb Raider game, there would be some brief intro narrative that gives a reason for Lara being dumped and stranded in the wilderness, and then you spend the rest of the game freely exploring a vast jungle, or mountain range, or desert, an island etc and trying to survive against the elements while simultaneously exploring the ruins, caves, caverns and tombs you come across. Maybe sprinkle in some educational information about the indigenous fauna and cultures of the area. She doesn't even have to be stranded, she is just out exploring and you operate out of some remote village in the middle of nowhere, gathering artifacts and information.

After seeing credits, I had zero interest in getting back into the game to find more tombs or unlock more stuff. Meh. Just glad it was over.

Sounds like I liked this a lot more than most, but I will definitely agree it was unnecessary. nu-2 already did the job of turning The Scared Survivor into The Tomb Raider. And the resolution of Trinity made absolutely zero god damned sense.

I think there were some fun set pieces but 2 probably still wins on that

I DID really enjoy the challenge tombs a lot more this time around. Combat felt completely tacked on. In 1 and 2 the selection of what upgrades I wanted to focus on felt meaningful. That was what it would take to survive the clusterfuck set-piece battles. In 3 I never wanted for resources and tended to be sitting next to an ammo crate during every battle.

I wouldn't say I was "glad it was over" as everyone else has. But I definitely felt I could have spent the time it took to get through the campaign on better games and I have zero interest in going back for anything.

And the idea that Lara has brought death and destruction to the world felt fairly half-assed. I am not even sure if I would really blame her in the first place (she kind of just accelerated the time table) and it seemed like the game mostly forgot it. I am not saying every game needs to be Mass Effect 3, but a little more focus on her guilt and maybe some hesitation before taking an axe to every wall she could find would have gone a long way.

---

Overall: I still think this was better than any Uncharted except maybe 4+DLC. But the fact that I still have 4+DLC on my "to play" list is probably a sign that I am done with this genre and have been for a while.

I enjoyed it. There's a lot more focus on exploration than the first two, and they did a good job with all the level/puzzle designs. The stealth combat sections were also pretty enjoyable and didn't wear out their welcome. The story was flat out bad, Lara is not likable in the game which is pretty damning. But it's worth picking up in a sale IMO just for how well it plays, I've been flirting with the idea of picking up the DLC myself.

If you liked Rise, there's no reason you won't like Shadow unless more of the same (in a different setting) doesn't appeal to you.

I never played Shadow so I can't fully chip in, but I had very little desire to see another one after the second one unless there were huge amount of improvements. More of the same didn't cut it when for me.

The story really needed work, and they kept going with 'in this she becomes the tomb raider'.

I finally finished it the other day. Stealth gameplay is a bit boring and easy. It may as well be automated. Where the gameplay really shines is the traversal and puzzle solving, specifically in the challenge tombs. Overall gameplay wise, it's quite fun and controls well. Visually it looks kind of jaw dropping. Play it on an Xbox One X if you can.

Story and character wise?...kind of terrible. In fact, so uninspired it really brings the whole game down. For a story as uninteresting as this, you're gonna need to give me a lot less cutscenes and melodrama. I don't care about Lara or her friend. I don't care about what's going on. Frankly I feel like this is the third time she's "become the tomb raider." Honestly just play Uncharted. Those games have good stories and extremely entertaining characters. These new Tomb Raider games are pretty good but I do not think I'll be getting a fourth one if they make it. I literally don't care about what's going on at all.

I still haven't played this game (I thought I made this thread more than two months ago), but I'm thinking about doing it next week maybe as there aren't any new games out that I want to play. Just curious if there is anyone else that has opinions on the game here. I guess now that I'm thinking about it, first and foremost the thing I'm most interested in is just the setting and the feeling of exploring places no one has set foot in, in ages. Figuring things out and just the beauty of it all. If that's good enough, I might not mind a dull story or less than great stealth/combat.

Just finished it this last week.

It's fine. At no point does it struggle to be anything more than that, and it never really gets much worse. The overly dark tone sometimes contrasts hard with what you're doing, and you'll have to shut your brain off early or else you'll be wondering why the hell Lara is doing things that got her into trouble in the first place. But that's my only real complaint with the game. It's mostly just more modern Tomb Raider. That was enough for me for the most part, but I sure do hope the story's a bit more fun and ambitious the next go-around.

It's fine but my least favorite of the remakes. The middle is a bit of a slog.

I beat it a while back as part of an increasingly long stretch of “nothing worthwhile is coming out so I’ll give this a shot.” It was average most of the way through with some peaks and valleys but never attained the same level of quality as the previous two games. It actually reminds me a little of Mass Effect Andromeda which I finished the other day - lots of resource collecting time sink’s for gear that has largely insignificant stat boosts.

I had started writing a review of Shadow after beating it because I had a lot of thoughts about how it always managed to feel like a B-tier effort of a much better series. I never finished that review because of just how little I cared in the end. It’s not awful but you can tell it’s not the same team that made the previous two.

It’s a sequel to a fantastic game that was pushed off onto another studio...so it was a solid base game that struggled to do much new.

The core is still there. It has its Red Dead Mexico moment, where too much time is spent living amongst the locals, stretching for time. So, it’s more Rise, just less inspired.

Beautiful game, though, with some fun weather effects and moments. Overall, I very much enjoyed it and was happy to pay for more tombs to explore. At the same time, I’d love to see if the original team would have made another Tomb Raider -> Rise caliber jump. They did a phenomenal job relaunching the series and an even better job following-up.

These games are meant to be played with the best graphics settings possible cause they are like tech demos. The gameplay itself is not the best but it is very pretty

I just finished this game two nights ago. I've enjoyed this trilogy overall. I don't think it's outstanding or anything, but it it's mostly enjoyable. I didn't pay full price for any of these games.

The stealth sections were usually pretty enjoyable, but if one enemy sees you--or if you kill an enemy that another can see (even of the second one can't see you--everyone on that map instantly know where you are. It's annoying. The upgrade system is fine, and I think the pace of the upgrades feels really good throughout each game. What gets annoying is having to constantly do the same upgrades in each game. That's annoying in every game series where you play the same character, though.

The story in this one is weird as hell. Early on, Lara is blamed by Trinity (and blames herself) for setting off an apocalypse. Except it doesn't make any sense--she takes an artifact that Trinity was after, too. And then kind of it gives it up without a fight, only to try to get it back do Trinity doesn't create an apocalypse of their own design.

The main antagonist in this game actually has a point and while his methods are certainly extreme, his goals are entirely understandable.

The exploration and puzzles are usually pretty interesting. The game has some really beautiful set pieces and the artifacts you find always look detailed.

The final boss fight feels like something out of the early 2000s. There's a moment at the end where they could've done something really interesting with the character of Lara, but they back out of it.

At least it ended its arc better than Game of Thrones!

I'm playing through this now and I'm also finding it to be very average.

It's weird because I replayed through TR2013 and Rise roughly 6 months ago and I still enjoyed them quite a lot. Shadow, however, is just not doing it for me - and I think it's kind of death by thousand cuts, because on the face of it, it doesn't seem like it should be worse than the others.

I think the biggest complaints that I can identify right now are:

• I actually liked the combat in the previous games. There's way less of that here. In maybe 20 hours, I've had like 3 combat encounters with humans. I'm less than half way though and I'm guessing there could be a chance that combat is skewed towards the back half of the game.
• No/unfulfilling equipment progression. I really liked the Metroidvania/Zelda-style equipment gated progression in Rise, where you'd complete a story segment (i.e. dungeon) and get a new ability allowing access to new areas. In Shadow you get to a town and there are NPCs just straight up selling the few piece of gating equipment, which seem to be only for opening doors optional collectibles.
• Collectathon. I admit I'm a victim of my own OCD here, but I already thought Rise was heavy on collectibles, and they seem to have tripled that in Shadow. Hunting down collectibles is tedious and really kills the flow of the game. There's definitely a balance to be found with that stuff and they went a little overboard.
• Another example of game being spoiled by DLC equipment. I bought the "Croft Edition" because it was on sale for $35 and there didn't seem to be a reason not to get the best version of the game. Little did I know that it would give me a crap ton of progression cheapening weapons and outfits.

@sweetz: the mediocrity is really evident - after I beat Shadow I decided to fire up Rise to see if maybe I’m just remembering the game through rose tinted glasses or something. But no, right from the start Rise just somehow FEELS better. It looks better. It feels less like a videogame in that the mechanics aren’t as blatantly on display.

Rise > Tomb > Shadow

But I liked all 3.

Just a heads up to anyone that finds this and posts recommendations. I just wanted to update this to say I finally bought it. It's on sale due to E3, and I had about six dollars through the Microsoft Rewards thing so I only had to buy it for about 24 dollars. I honestly which it was for less, but oh well; it's not likely it'll drop from its full price soon so better now then after the sale goes away obviously. I could very well feel like this game is 'meh', but I wanted to experience it for myself to see.

The graphics are a clear downgrade from Rise and even Tomb raider 2013 I think due to the engine change. The shooting and stealth do feel better

@ieee_gb: The engine didn't change, just a different developer behind it. They both use the foundation engine. It looks superb so I'm not sure I agree with that. The thing that's noticeably not great is some of the ground texture work, which can look like it lacks some detail. It has some improvements. Not only that but what surprises me most is how good the game sounds. It has some of the best sound design I've heard in a while and really good dynamic range. The sound really encapsulates the player in the world, and from what I've heard, I really like the sound effects and music.

I don't dislike Jason Graves music; he did an awesome job on Dead Space, but I really like what Brian D'Oliveira brought. So far, story-wise it's fine. It was weird to me that Lara was so dumb early on when taking the dagger and acted as if she didn't know the consequences. She was acting like the bad guy, but maybe there's a reason for it. I'm already liking the writing and more in-depth relationship between characters than the previous ones. There's more back and forth between Lara and Jonah too which I appreciate.

There was only one part that had shooting so far, but it's fine too I guess. Definitely not the strong suit it seems, which is something I was expecting when looking at the footage. I also really like that in games now, in the accessibility options you can turn the button prompts to hold instead of tap. What I do find awkward though is that they have the follow horizontal camera on as a default which feels weird and isn't typical to these games.

I figured I would just respond to this thread rather than make a new post since it's not that old yet.

Kind of surprised how all over the place opinion is on this game, though I suppose this level of 7/8 out of 10 game often winds up that way. Chris Plante at Polygon seems to think it's the best in the trilogy by sheer virtue of iteration, but most other reviewers consider it at best "another one of those" and at worst "another one of those". Most of the truly negative reviews seemed to take the game a bit too seriously - yes, Lara Croft is a symbol of colonial greed and she always steers conversations towards her own emotions and desires, but all it takes is gutting out this game's prologue section or receiving the "First Blood" trophy for murdering from a mud wall to realize this series wants it that way. Better to just accept this Lara Croft for the psychopath she is and enjoy the thrill ride.

Biggest surprise is the comments in this thread deriding the graphics - other than some flat faces and very Horizon: Zero Dawn-esque NPC conversations, this game looks absolutely stunning IMO. As someone who's played Uncharted 4, The Last of Us 2, Red Dead Redemption 2 and Destiny 2 on my first 4K, HDR-enabled TV set in the past six months, it's this handed-off Tomb Raider game that is giving me my first rapid fire "oh shit, oh shit, oh shit" moments as if I bought a new console, not the same old PS4 I've had for almost seven years.

But the story has as much tonal whiplash as this year's definitive film, WW84, and it's disappointing just how much of the game assumes, always. If one enemy sees you, there's no going back into stealth try as you might - so why intimate at some Batman/Predator-esque horrors when it's really still a run-and-gun game? It's also disappointing that the gunplay feels like a notable step back from both previous entries - bullets feel inanimate the way they did in the PS3 Uncharteds, and the flow of most fights just doesn't feel very legible. But also the way you enter a new place seemingly buring and isolated in a jungle but the entire town already has a nickname for you or Lara and Jonah just knowing the names of places and things they've never been to before or talked/read about.

At times the environments are pretty hard to read, also, just because they are so jam-packed with assets. It's realism at a cost, honestly. I've realized I made a post on these forums prior to the game's release expressing excitement for the flexibility to turn off the in-world guidance mechanics that Naughty Dog's perfected and everyone else borrowed heavily from, but in practice these environments are actually too dense. Throw in all the collectibles, secret pathways and other diversions - early in the game I took a detour from the path Jonah and I were on only to spend the next three hours hunting, looting and raiding while Jonah just stood around in the thicket I'd left him - and this reminds me of my brief time with both Watch_Dogs games or any Assassin's Creed Quick Look I've watched. There's a lot of effort and beauty on display here...but to what end? I feel like I'm pulling up the map or clicking R3 every 5-10 seconds, and I know I played the last two games similarly but I didn't feel so overwhelmed by it.

Lastly on gameplay, I think deciding to replace the hub spaces of Rise with the distinct cities of Shadow is actually a poor choice, and I wouldn't be surprised if all the design work that went into these cities led to some drawbacks across the rest of the game. I'm fine with this game being light on combat, but it is one of Shadow's game flavors and would at least break up the monotony of the collect-a-thon a bit if, like Rise, you first had to clear these big areas full of collectibles out just one time before the coast would be clear to explore freely. The game also hints early at some Metal Gear Solid 3 aspirations, and it's a shame that all culminates in another in video games' long line of animals who seem way overpowered.

I might be proven wrong on this eventually, but everything about this story from a plane crash and a dangling lost set of equipment to weird wendigo-beasts popping in and out of the scenery seems to suggest these designers liked the very first Uncharted and just wanted to modernize it with a lady. Hell, they keep mentioning El Dorado in this game and that was Nathan's first ultimate goal!

All that said, I am enjoying myself. At times this game is even pretty awesome. But it does ultimately feel like it's just weighed down by everything it's influenced by - its ancient civilization angle doesn't get the sci-fi filter benefit that Horizon's did, it's "a thief's reckoning" theme feels like a pale imitation of A Thief's End, and its Metroid aspect feels completely misunderstood compared to the first two games.

Do I wish I'd kept on waiting for this game to come to PS+ like the other two games eventually did? I suppose it'd be nice to still have that $15 I forked over less than 24 hours before it was announced to be this month's free game, but I also really enjoy this series when it's in its bag and I don't think this is an effort on the level of other so-called franchise wet blankets like Mass Effect: Andromeda, Lost Planet 3, Medal of Honor: Warfighter, Name Your Need for Speed Entrant or whatever. It's just ...pretty good and fairly problematic.

@nodima: I don't know how far you are into the game, but the city stuff gets a lot worse deeper in. Without spoiling anything there are stretches of that game that feel like a bad adventure game with a lot of fetch quests and talking to people and just...it really slows down for a story and performances that don't merit it.

The game looks fantastic and the combat is adequate (though not as punchy as Rise's.) It has the best challenge tombs of the series by far, and they're arguably some of the best 3D puzzle platformer levels I've ever seen, but it's super padded with a bunch of really boring sections.

It has some very odd systems that seem like it might have once been an actually huge open world game before becoming more of a linear game (with backtracking) even though the Tomb Raider series were all linear games with backtracking.

The game is fun when you're shooting dudes in the face or stealthing them from the shadows or making your way through the traversal sections in some abandoned ruin, and it's not fun when you're condescending to locals and running around doing chores for them, and there's way too much of the latter.

Who sat down to design a Tomb Raider game and said "what this needs are some RPG style sidequests with no combat or traversal, just a bunch of running around and chatting?"

@bigsocrates: Well, I wrote that post after spending the better part of three hours hearing some local old wives' tales so I could get a kid his dice back while constantly being sidetracked by new murals, survivor caches, realizing I could finally lockpick chests and backtracking to open all the ones I'd had to pass by before... I'm not sure it'll get much more mundane than that. Then I raided a tomb that culminated in a sort of Aladdin-style street rat chase that just kind of...ended, like driving 50 in a 45 and getting t-boned by a truck full more side quests. I'm kinda into how brazenly pointless this afternoon has been.

I have a high tolerance for mindless activities in games that let me pay attention to other things as well. I'm the weirdo that still thinks in some ways Destiny was at its best in the first six months of Destiny 1. It's actually kind of why I avoid the Ubisoft stuff - I mean, I don't think Far Cry, Watch_Dogs or Assassin's Creed feel particularly good to play from the handfuls of hours I've had with entries in those franchises, so that helps, but I also know that if they ever hit me with a character I actually cared about I would be the guy with 250 hours in one of their games for no good reason.

I didn't care for it. I remember the open world being pretty half-cooked even among it's half-cooked open world peers. The story was absolutely atrocious.

Pretty wild that right after a pretty huge story beat the game immediately resets to neutral and throws another handful of hours of tombs, crypts, legendary creatures and side quests at you...despite the first two activities being far and away where the money shots are in this game.

Two of the most glaring problems with this game at this moment is that Lara is dressed in this regalia that is equal parts Carja from Horizon and vaguely Greek, bringing to mind footage I've seen of AC: Odyssey, and thus I'm constantly comparing the hugely low stakes of what I'm doing to Horizon (where at least the awkwardly framed conversations contained some player choice and unique world building via dialogue trees) and the mundanity of what I'm doing to how much people seemed to love Origins, causing me to wonder if I should bite the bullet the next time that deluxe edition is on sale and find out once and for all if I truly dislike AC or if it evolved into exactly what I need out of a passive game...

It's a shame because you constantly butt up against interesting ideas and the art is seriously at the upper echelon of video games - this competes with anything Sony first-party, KojiPro or modern Netherrealm - but clearly so much time was spent trying to live up to games that sell better than Tomb Raider for completely mystifying reasons in pursuit of Square-Enix's nebulous sales goals that all the great stuff about this game doesn't get a chance to be perfect, all the good stuff teeters perilously on the precipice of mediocre and the copious mediocre stuff is tainted by all the cognitive dementia this game seems determined to induce in its pacing and thematic consistency.

It's maybe the most emblematic tragedy of a 15 hour game that so desperately wanted to be a 70 hour game this era of open world and service games I've ever experienced; at least Far Cry and Watch_Dogs games are pretty hollow playgrounds from the very beginning. This reboot series had an opportunity to stand toe-to-toe with last generation's Uncharted as the epitome of focused, spectacle-laden games with the upshot that it was secretly the far better series to play even if the characters and enemies were mostly bland. Instead it's...I'm not really sure how this era of Tomb Raider will be remembered.

The more I play, the more I take back some of what I said earlier. I'm still having a good time because of the sort of person I am and the sort of things I can get excited about with games like this - again, that I can acknowledge this is pointless to pay attention to and queue up a backlog of Giant Bomb and podcasts outside major cutscenes - but this is so obviously missing what makes this series special while also doing those things better than ever. What a shame.

Oh, shit. It's The Last of Us Part 2: Prologue now.

@nodima: It seems like you've gotten to some of the worse late game stuff. Yeah, it's a bummer. I'm not sure if I've seen anyone make the comparison but I actually think that it has some similarities to Marvel's The Avengers in that both games have a solid enough core to be really good single player experiences and both games spend way too much time doing things they're not good at instead, though Avengers is much worse.

Shadow has other problems. It's a step back from Rise in terms of combat and especially combat encounter design; a lot of the fights in Shadow feel very perfunctory. It is more than a step back in terms of story, not that Rise had a great one but Shadow's is actively bad. At times Shadow feels like it wants to be edutainment, with lots of unnecessary details about the history of the local culture. It does that stuff poorly and makes Lara's character unbearable in the process, but it certainly gives it a shot.

I don't think Shadow could ever have really challenged Uncharted. In addition to its pacing problems it has neither the story/character stuff nor the big wow spectacle stuff that is Uncharted's true bread and butter. Uncharted is at its best when it's an action movie and it's either showing off astonishingly detailed set pieces or its characters are cracking wise with each other. Modern Tomb Raider is at its best during good combat encounters or when you're doing challenge tomb stuff. They have a lot of similarities but very different strengths.

This thread has me thinking about installing Shadow and going back for some of the DLC challenge tombs that I never got around to because by the end of that game I just wanted to finish it. Which is a shame because all the tombs except the combat focused ones were great, and even the combat ones were tolerable. But there's just too much crud to slog through in that game. I went in thinking that it couldn't possibly be as bad as everyone said it was, and it wasn't. I've seen lots of people saying that they ruined the combat and they didn't. It's not as good as Rise's but it's serviceable, and the challenge tombs are really remarkably good, but the game leans into its worst aspects in some really baffling ways.

I had never finished the modern Tomb Raiders after reboot so I’ve been going back to Rise and then on to Shadow.

Folks don’t paint a great picture of it but at least in regards to the story I usually take games where people are saying its so bad and come away with Eh its Fine.

A little more concerned on gunplay because I already think It feels really bolted on every time there’s a fight in Rise.

I liked it even if I prefer the first in the trilogy, mostly since it didn't focus so much on loot and collectibles as the sequels. The DLC missions are the highlights.

Dug into all of the game's DLC earlier this week before taking a short break before the endo f the road. The tombs are all pretty cool and I think it's interesting that there's a speedrunning aspect to them but I don't see myself engaging with that.

The entire backend of this game is a mess in some pretty wild ways. It's super annoying that most of the DLC is packaged in Paititi and the most interesting rewards for the DLC are usually outfits because this is the one region in the game where you're only allowed to wear ritual dresses and a lot of the DLC rewards aren't that sort of stuff. Also a weird decision because you spend so much time cosplaying as an Incan or Mayan priestess that you really start questioning why this is a Lara Croft game at all.

Anyway, I'd noticed some bad word of mouth surrounding the game's final boss and they weren't lying. He's technically very easy to fight if you've got the whole skill tree unlocked so he's got a leg up on true disasters like the end of Wolfenstein: The New Order but the whole thing is a technical tour de force of bad design, from gameplay to sound and everything in between. Wow.

Perhaps this game couldn't have ended any other way but Lara promising the villain to continue being a white savior for his people, followed by the screen fading to white...and hard-locking on that screen. I waited for five minutes and pressed a few buttons before closing the application and re-opening it (oddly I didn't have to file a bug report, suggesting...what, exactly?) Luckily, it loaded up exactly at that white screen and moved on with the cutscene. Truly weird (but not as weird as Lara's dad actually referring to her mom as "[his] white queen") and one-of-a-kind experience. I suppose if I can't have the bugged out ending of Cyberpunk this'll do just fine.

In the end, I'm not especially mad I put $15 on this game hours before it was announced as this month's PS+ and I've said as much already, but this game is still in pretty rough shape two years on. At least they seemed to realize how much of a dud it's ending was - they dropped not one but four trophies on me as the credits started to roll. Felt nice.

Been playing this off and on since I upgraded my PC, wanted to flex the 3090/5950x. (How did I justify such a ludicrous purchase? WFH productivity, mostly, lol.)

This game is super underwhelming. As someone who played Tomb Raider and Rise of the Tomb Raider in a sort of "guilty pleasure" kind of way -- the pseudo-exploration and checkbox ticking really clicked with me, I enjoyed the tombs, and the games looked great, even if the combat and story were mediocre -- this is the worst one.

I think I genuinely hate the design of the "open world" in this one? I've really soured on mixing open world collectible hunting/side-questing with cinematic narrative games, because I'm always paranoid about accidentally going down the one "totally not critical path looking" mud path that turns out to be a critical path, but before I can correct my mistake a cutscene takes control from me, now OH NO I'M SLIDING DOWN AND TRINITY IS CHASING ME AND EXPLOSIONS, and all I wanted was to turn around to find that one extra language tablet! Now, this could be remedied by just clicking the right stick for the "Totally Not Batman Detective Vision" constantly and seeing which path has the objective marker. That being said, this game already has too much "I'm clicking this stick over and over to see if there were any glowing tiny boxes I missed." It's miserable.

This game's story throws dark without ever actually trying to earn it? A literal child dies on screen (to be fair, they drown off-camera somewhere after falling into a flood, but still), and it's all for a real forced, "Who's the real villain, huh, Lara?" It has the presence of mind to insinuate "maaaaaaybe this posh British lady raiding indigenous tombs" is a bad thing, but never says as much out loud. Instead, we settle for the, "we're not so different, you and I" schtick that I've made a habit of laughing at every time I see a villain say it since The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift. Also, despite this attempt at criticizing Lara, there's no critique of the imperialist practice of taking artifacts from other countries' ancient sites (the bit going through Croft manor just seeing a who's who of cultural theft is real jaw dropping). It all gets watered down to "aw, you put your friends in danger and the world might end". High stakes? Sure. Relevant at all to Lara Croft's character and what she has stood for? Not at all. It then has the gall to have the classic "she's gonna help these indigenous people with the problem they couldn't solve themselves" bullshit in the secret city, giving her so much as a bunch of their clothing (see, she's been accepted as one of them! in two seconds!) I can't wait to see majority of Lara's outfits in this one at the next in-person Coachella in 2025, when concerts exist again.

The skill tree is even less valuable than it was in Rise. A bucketload of skills for "get a little more scrap," "get slightly better merchant prices," "have slightly more effective herbs," and very few gameplay-altering abilities. "Kill an enemy after a melee counter" -- what if I never get into melee combat, game? What about then? "Get a visual indication of a headshot" (a holdover from Rise) -- was the head not clear enough?

Lastly, this was designed by the Deus Ex: Human Revolution/Mankind Divided folks in Eidos Montreal, and it shows in some spots in less-than-favorable ways. The number of times I walked through multiple paths in a tomb, thinking they led to some exploration goodies, only to see it was just another way to get to the critical path... ugh.

Game does look real pretty, but even that isn't perfect. The settings menu on the PC is real weird about only letting you change certain things (mostly RTX/DLSS settings) from the launcher. DLSS, though I haven't confirmed this, feels like DLSS 1.0 rather than 2.0, and the top right corner of my screen is always flickering with it active? The ray-tracing adds very little to this particular title. Some great looking moments in HDR, though.