Close, but not quite enough golden treasure from latest Tomb Raider

IT HAS an atmospheric jungle setting, spectacular graphics and an engaging story, but Shadow Of The Tomb Raider struggles to keep its footing.

VIDEO games are great places for adventure, and one of the longest-running names in the video game adventure canon is Lara Croft, AKA the Tomb Raider, who has been delving for treasure since the 1996 with various reboots along the way.

The latest in the series has been developed by Crystal Dynamics and published by Square Enix for PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, Shadow Of The Tomb Raider is the final game in the rebooted Tomb Raider trilogy which kicked off in 2013, charting Lara Croft’s transformation from university student-archaeologist grieving her father’s sudden death to someone Indiana Jones would not want to run into down a dark alley.

Shadow Of The Tomb Raider looks absolutely amazing. It is spectacularly cinematic and some of the set pieces are awe-inspiring. There’s an excellent use of light and shadow as well, the levels themselves look incredible, with interesting and detailed environments that perfectly capture the imagery and atmosphere. Lara also has a range of outfits available, conferring different bonuses, and it is also possible (purely for laughs) to play many sections of the game with 1996-era Polygonic Lara Croft as your character.

The story itself is also engaging, dealing as it does with Lara Croft negligently putting in motion a Mayan Apocalypse — although it does require some suspension of disbelief on the player’s part, especially with regards to accepting Lara’s responsibility for the whole thing — sending her and good friend Jonah Maiava on a mission to stop it by recovering another artefact with the power to prevent the world being destroyed.

Thematically, it’s hard not to see parallels with Predator and Alien — indeed, one scene near the start of the game where Lara shrinks back from a jaguar which is sniffing her out seems to be a direct reference to the famous scene in Alien 3 — and the game is also somewhat darker than the previous entry in the series.

Combat is pretty standard fare for this type of game — if it isn’t broken, there’s no reason to fix it, after all — with Lara having access to a range of weapons including her trusty bow, handguns, assault rifles, shotguns, and, in a pinch, her climbing axes. Stealth is a key part of the game too, with Lara adept at hiding in trees, shadows and ruins, waiting for the right moment to strike.

The story itself is also very engaging and lots of fun.

But for such a gorgeous and polished game, the designers have spectacularly dropped the artefact in a few areas.

A big one is in terms of the puzzles — it was often unclear exactly what I needed to do to complete them, beyond a quest marker at the ultimate destination. For example, there was a puzzle involving an elaborate windmill-driven contraption which Lara had to make her way up to reach a ledge at the top. It was not immediately clear which route needed to be taken, and even more infuriatingly, the structure was surrounded by scaffolding which Lara should have been quite capable of climbing unaided, even without factoring in the climbing axes and rope arrows she was carrying.

Alas, the designers had decreed the only way to the top was via the predetermined (and not very clear) path, causing a huge amount of frustrating and swearing as Lara fell off yet another “apparently not nearly as solid as it looked” ledge and plummeted to her doom, or simply refused to climb the scaffolding right in front of her.

This carried over to some aspects of the story itself, with characters doing things that suited the plot rather than because it was realistic. There’s also supposedly an in-game hint system, but it gravitated between stating the obvious and not being any help in the situation at all.

Many of the in-game upgrades to Lara’s firearms have apparently been designed by people who have never fired a gun before, including such nonsense as a barrel heat shroud to improve reloading times (the two things are not even remotely connected in reality), and a “polished barrel” to improve damage due to less barrel friction (that is absolutely not even remotely how it works in real life; all you’d end up with is a rifle with ruined barrelling that can’t hit anything accurately anymore).

There’s an excellent use of light and shadow as well, the levels themselves look incredible, with interesting and detailed environments.

Lara herself is not a warm or relatable character in many respects, either. She is at the end of her transformation from uni student to The Tomb Raider and has obviously seen or experienced a lot of PTSD-inducing things, so it wouldn’t fit the character to be cracking jokes or making light of situations the way Nathan Drake and friends do in the Uncharted games — but it’d be nice if she’d chill out a bit, to put it bluntly.

The developers are clearly portraying her as human and flawed (which is good) with her Predator-style predilection for getting covered in mud and appearing out of the jungle to skewer unsuspecting mercenaries. In one scene, she agonises over accidentally getting a lot of people drowned at the start of the game due to her impetuousness, but in the next she swims up to a dock, uses a climbing axe to drag some hapless goon into the water and then simultaneously drowns them and breaks their neck, before proceeding to shoot or knife every other mercenary on said dock.

Basically, the sudden tone switching between “angsty and lost” and “apex jungle predator” makes it hard to get a feel for her as a character — not helped by some of the frankly ridiculous storytelling aspects.

I can accept, for gameplay and story purposes, the inhabitants of a remote Peruvian oil town/trading post all speaking English — but the residents of a hidden city high in the Andes speaking perfect English doesn’t so much stretch suspension of disbelief boundaries as snaps them in half — especially when the conversations the villagers have between themselves are in their native language.

There are just a few things holding the game back in my opinion.

I spent far too much of the game wanting to know why I couldn’t do things that seemed sensible or logical — like climb up solid-looking scaffolding to reach destinations, or kill the guards watching a bridge so I could get across without having to go through a whole lot of climbing and jumping — and it just kept pulling me out of the world and frustrating me, not helped by shifting camera angles which frequently caused me to mistime or misalign jumps.

These flaws stop Shadow Of The Tomb Raider from being a truly great game, and instead dial it down to “pretty good”.

It does many things well and it is by no means a bad game, but with an absolutely packed AAA release schedule this month and next month (including some huge titles like Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey, Red Dead Redemption 2, and Call Of Duty: Black Ops IIII) it’s hard to recommend this as a must-buy right now.

If you’re a diehard Lara Croft fan, or you love the genre, then it might be worth squeezing it into your gaming diary — but otherwise, I’d suggest waiting until the December/January lull in AAA gaming before donning your hiking boots, stringing your bow and dusting off the treasure map.

Originally published as Close, but not quite enough golden treasure from latest Tomb Raider