Post Script
How Shadow Of The Tomb Raider spoils one of its best features
On the face of it, Shadow Of The Tomb Raider’s three-pronged approach to difficulty is an excellent idea: letting you choose different settings for combat, exploration and puzzling should, in theory, cater to all kinds of players. Take combat, for example. Those who (understandably) aren’t particularly interested in Lara Croft: Killing Machine can choose the Easy difficulty, benefitting from aim assist, enemies that take fewer shots before dying, and more generous ammo supplies. And if you are – well, you’re in for long stretches without stabbing someone in the neck or firing a bow in anger, but when you’re in a fight you’ll know about it: enemies are more alert, hit harder and Croft won’t be able to regenerate health. And clicking in the right stick won’t help. Her patented Survival Instincts won’t highlight enemies, as they do on the other two settings.
Unfortunately, this requires a degree of situational awareness that the encounter design hardly supports, The jungle is so dense and thick in detail, and the camera so tight to Croft, that you can’t reasonably be expected to know whether dragging one poor sap into the undergrowth will or won’t alert one of his friends. In the latter stages, when the enemy count ramps up and the heavy ordnance comes out, breaking line of sight isn’t really an option when spotted, since one solid hit can be enough to take you down.
For puzzles, meanwhile, we opt for Hard puzzle difficulty from the outset, which bans hints and Survival Instincts entirely, while forcing you to get your skates on wherever timing factors into a solution. Yet the purist’s route is a double-edged sword: you merely end up wandering around for longer, waiting to bump into an item that offers a button prompt to let you know you can interact with it. On the Normal setting, Croft is supposed to hint at the next action to perform (the crucial object is highlighted in blue on Easy) though she mostly seems content to offer the first step of the solution and leave the rest to you. It hardly helps that she’ll parrot the same line every time you use Survival Instincts to pinpoint nearby interactables.
Beyond the odd glitch – one puzzle solution only works the second time we try it, having exhausted every other possible method – part of the problem with the puzzle areas is bound to the game’s capricious traversal mechanics. Unobservant explorers can be led in the right direction with bold white stripes of paint up walls (subtler tones are used on Normal) and along ledges and lit base camps, though you’ll stumble across the latter even if you’re not specifically looking out for them: few are far away from the critical path. But then the white paint is only necessary in the first place because seemingly obvious paths turn out to be misleading, and Croft’s occasional failure to grab functional handholds and ledges can lead you to believe you’ve lost your bearings. In fact, sometimes you won’t have the first idea where you’re supposed to be headed at all. It’s one thing to do away with a HUD, quite another to offer so little direction that players need to pull up their map to find the next waypoint.
Meanwhile, if you’re determined to muddle through without help, you’ll likely find the game doesn’t go far enough. Certain areas require specific equipment, and even on Hard you’ll get a clumsy text overlay to let you know what you’re missing in patronising capitals – Guacamelee, come back, all is forgiven. Worse still, you’ll get pop-up text tutorials for basic traversal techniques whenever you’ve not used one in a little while, and there’s seemingly no way to turn them off. We’re all for developers making games accessible to a broader audience, but too often it feels like Shadow Of The Tomb Raider is compensating for its own design shortfalls.