Sha-DOH of the Tomb Raider
Finally wrapping this series up. This game feels like a step backwards, with too much focus on big glamourous stuff and new systems and not enough on simply structuring the gameplay experience to be fun and interesting. Take note that this is one of the most expensive games ever made, costing $100M to produce.
Systems are added to the Rise formula that don't enhance the game meaningfully. That's fine, games always do that. The bigger issue is the pacing. The game is just not storyboarded correctly. You have long stretches of nothing but traversal, and not nearly as much combat as you would want. All of your upgrades are ultimately to enhance your combat abilities but you hardly every get to flex them. Rise did a vastly superior job giving you challenging & exciting combat scenarios to justify your investment into the upgrades and skill trees. When you do get combat it's against creepy monster dudes (no spoilers) or jaguar warriors, both of which you just have to BLAST away at. You might sneak kill one jaguar warriors but then you're just blasting because the combat arenas and scenarios are not as good as the last game. Rare combat vs mercs is still solid, but the scenarios less exciting. The underwater sections are not enjoyable.
The writing... stinks. The overarching plot is good and I like the South America setting, but the details and execution of the storytelling are poor. There are times when characters have information but don't comment on it when they see you, only to radio call you alter to talk about it. There's a fundamnetal misunderstanding of the flow of information to and from each individual character in this game that screams sloppy writing. The worst of it is the way the characters deliver their lines. The direction of the voice acting is awful. The actors don't seem to know how their counterparts are acting the scene, and it shows. This is a continuous problem. I find Lara's voice acting very flat. On the polish side of voice directing: In one scene, Lara mispronounces a word (Nahual) back to another character, repeatedly, despite that character clearly enunciating it first. Another scene has a key character, mis-state his sister-in-law's (other key character) name be replacing an A with a U. Embarassing for a game with this budget.
The new tombs are entirely forgettable.
Game looks great for the most part but the character animations and how they interact with eachother is firmly in the uncanny valley. It's not really acceptable for a $100M game in 2018 to have such stilted animations in cutscenes and dialogue. They get a ton of credit for the incredible variety of assets and detail to those assets. After playing the first two games on PC, I played on PS4 this time around. Framerate was poor in the Hidden City area but otherwise it ran alright.
I enjoyed the game but wouldn't recommend it. Interesting that this series follows the Uncharted 1-2-3 pattern very closely, but basically a full star lower than that series across the board. In the same ways 3 was a disappointment after 2, Shadow let's you down after Rise -- 6-7 years later to the party than Naughty Dog.. At the end of the day only Rise is worth checking out.
I sure hope they right the ship and deliver their "Uncharted 4" next time around.
Played May 2022
