Shadow of the Tomb Raider
Management is worried that Andy Kelly is smearing himself in mud, yet again, but really he’s just getting into character.
Management is worried that Andy Kelly is smearing himself in mud again, but he’s just getting into character.
It’s in the moments of quiet spectacle where Shadow of the Tomb
Raider is most compelling: emerging from a dark, claustrophobic cavern into a grand temple glittering with gold and jade; a village resting in the shadow of a vast, dormant volcano; ancient mechanisms whirring to life as you awaken a slumbering tomb. It’s a world aching to be explored.
Normally when Lara Croft finds an artefact it’s your reward for surviving a treacherous journey through a trap-ridden tomb. But the ornate dagger she plucks from a stone pedestal early in this game is a different story – it triggers a series of devastating cataclysms, including a flash flood that destroys an entire city, and she travels to the jungles of Peru to try and stop the apocalyptic prophecy she’s unwittingly helped fulfil.
And it’s here where Lara finds those incredible tombs, temples and towering tributes to the gods. The sense of place and scale in this game is frequently astonishing. The places you visit feel genuinely ancient, mysterious and dangerous. Every crypt, chamber and corridor is decorated with detailed murals and elaborate carvings. These exaggerated, dramatic structures could never exist or stay hidden in reality, of course, but their size, complexity and theatricality give the game the feel of a pulpy adventure story. It’s ancient history as taught by Indiana Jones, not Simon Schama.
As well as looking impressive, the ruins also give you intricate, room-sized puzzles to solve. These showcase some of the game’s best design, and although the solutions are never that difficult to figure out, cracking these massive puzzle boxes is hugely satisfying. One involving a rotating pillar in a skyscraper-sized chamber, where you use ropes and wind-powered machines to make your way to the top, is particularly entertaining. But the smaller interactions are fun too and have a nice feeling of physicality – like deciphering obscure hieroglyphs, navigating dark underwater labyrinths, rotating chutes to guide streams of water or igniting pools of oil.
If Shadow of the Tomb Raider was nothing more than a series of beautiful locations filled with puzzles like these, we’d have been happy. But the presence of Trinity, a villainous, artefact-hunting paramilitary group, means Lara has to get her hands dirty in combat from time to time. Thankfully, standard firefights are kept to a minimum, and most of these encounters involve smearing yourself in mud (classic weekend fun) and creeping around choking people like a tiny, posh Rambo. The amount of cover provided is too generous at times, but there’s something grimly empowering about skulking through the mud and filth, silently killing off guards as their buddies are whipped up into a panic.
Stealth is, in general, much better than in previous games. If you’re spotted, an alert meter above an enemy’s head will start to fill up, but if you manage to break line of sight and hide before it does, you’ll be safe. And there are a few neat ways to screw with the AI too, including the wildly entertaining fear arrows. Fire one of these poisontipped arrows at an enemy and they’ll start hallucinating and madly firing their weapon at anyone nearby, before collapsing in a confused, sweaty heap. You can also hide in the trees and string enemies up in the jungle canopy with
a rope. Lara is basically Batman and the Predator rolled into one now, which jars a little with the game’s efforts to paint her as a flawed, human character.
We groaned all the way through the previous game,
Rise of the Tomb Raider, with every outbreak of yet another boring gunfight, but in Shadow of the Tomb
Raider the action set-pieces are well spaced out and mostly entertaining. Playing it like a regular third-person shooter is much more difficult now, even when Lara upgrades her arsenal with shotguns and assault rifles, meaning stealth is usually the best option. There are some low points, though. An enemy introduced later in the game turns it into a brainless, tedious shooter, loudly telegraphed by the abundance of shotgun ammo littered around the level. And the underwater stealth sections where you have to hide from hungry piranhas are every bit as terrible as they sound.
The world is large and interconnected, with areas that are inaccessible until you locate a certain piece of gear, and you have the ability to fast travel between campfires you’ve lit along the way. There are also a few atmospheric hubs, including a gorgeous, lively mountain city called Paititi. The world-building in these regions is fantastic, and wandering around talking to people (and petting llamas) is a pleasant change of pace. You can pick up side missions here too, helping locals with their troubles, but none of it is that interesting. There’s a lot of stuff to do in
Shadow of the Tomb Raider: killing animals to craft outfits, scavenging for materials to upgrade weapons, uncovering hidden crypts. But it’s the challenge tombs – big, fun, selfcontained environmental puzzles with a prize at the end and a story to uncover through diaries and artefacts – that remain the most gratifying side activities.
Swimming plays a bigger role this time, with the addition of air pockets allowing for longer underwater sections. Tombs often have submerged areas, forcing you to dive to dislodge jammed machinery or locate items that have fallen into the depths. Lara has a large skill tree to work through, and increasing her swimming speed and breath capacity makes going underwater more enjoyable.
Lara is a more capable, confident hero this time around but still has moments of self-doubt and frailty that give the story some heart. This is cheapened slightly by the gruesome guerrilla violence of the combat, where she mercilessly stabs, drowns and shoots people without a glimmer of remorse or disgust. But hey, it’s a video game.
Shadow of the Tomb Raider is unashamedly a blockbuster, with some action set-pieces – fleeing an exploding oil refinery, hopping across debris in a flooded city – that are terribly exciting but not very interactive. And that’s fine, because there’s enough elsewhere in the puzzles, stealth and exploration that it can be forgiven those moments where it slides into full-on absurd Hollywood nonsense mode. Even at its dumbest, the lavish production values make it a thrill to watch.
The balance of puzzling, exploration and action has always felt a little off in this modern incarnation of Tomb
Raider, leaning a little too heavily and frequently towards the latter. But this instalment shows impressive restraint, rarely using combat as a crutch and focusing more on what makes this series special – raiding tombs. The tombs here are undoubtedly the stars of the show, and some of the best in the series. The feeling of trespassing in an ancient, cursed place is palpable, and hearing the stone door scrape open when you finally solve that puzzle is always a satisfying feeling. And it’s these moments, not the exploding refineries, helicopter battles or expensive cinematic set pieces that make this worth playing.
Keep in mind Linux gamers get the Definitive Edition, which includes the rather pointless Deluxe and Croft Edition extras (weapons and outfits) but also the complete Season Pass access to the extra DLC; seven new tombs and additional side missions, which extends the main game and genuinely improves the experience.
Performance seemed as good as you can expect. Our modest AMD RX 580 and AMD Ryzen 5 1600X test rig manage an average 57fps at 1080p on the highest settings for a smooth experience. For giggles we even tried it on the unsupported Nvidia GTX 750 (almost six years old with only 1GB of VRAM) and were impressed it ran at all – lowest settings at 720p – at around 30fps with no issues, but obviously your millage will vary.