izigame.me

After the fun I had with the first two games in the reboot series. I was excited for the third.
All I can really say is there's a reason that the reboot series ended with this one. If you want a good game, go replay the first reboot, or the second, or even the remake of the very first game, or the topdown co-op game. They're way more worth your time.
Most of the time? finding your way around is incredibly difficult. I left the game on standard difficulty, but I had problems really identifying where the game wanted me to go. Or even what was ABLE to be traversed. There's supposed to be "white paint" where you can go on the normal difficulty, but the white paint is lost in busy and dark environments which lead me to look up guides, not because I wasn't competent but because when the environment is this busy you're not sure what the developers intended to be intractable. Since every jump is met with an instadeath if you slightly mess up, you're gonna be watching those death scenes over and over and over again. The climbable walls are vague, things that look climbable aren't, things that are climbable don't look like they should be and it all just leads to a frustrating experience.
The puzzles are either boring or impossible. One puzzle required a pendulum that you had to swing, but if you interact with it at the wrong part of the swing, nothing happens, and it's a new mechanic never used until that point, so you have no indicators that this is a mechanic the devs programmed into the game. At one point, the only answer I could figure out for the puzzle was "guess until you get it right", and then the part after that was just "radio deus ex machnia". This happened throughout all of the challenge tombs, which either were vague, or so straightforward there was no "challenge" in them. Multiple times I looked up a youtube video purely to be told "it took me 10 minutes and constantly dying to find this one thing you can climb or interact with that doesn't look like you should".
The graphics and animations are rough here too. Like. Sonic Boom levels of rough. There's character pop in on cutscenes, there's animations that don't match up to what's going on. Characters look less realistic than the previous 2 games that came before this. Remember that cool clothing water physics thing where Lara's clothes got wet when you swam and then dried out in the first game? No more! now there's no difference in your character model. She looks completely out of place while swimming. Running through mud looks like she's wearing a diaper, and she comes out completely clean. Those cool RE4 style death animations? sometimes they're just disjointed. Fell off a sign above a raging river? Impaled on rebar in a completely different part of the map because you have to die "somewhere". How about overly long ones where you might as well go get a coffee because it'll be that long before you can play again. Multiple animations are cleverly hidden "below the camera" so you can't see how disjointed they are (looking at you "knife digging animation").
Mechanically the game is mediocre, it's not that the platforming isn't competent. it is! Combat is brokenly simple! At one point, I literally just stood in one place and killed everyone in a fight with the first rifle, before walking over and maxing out my ammo off the bodies. At another point I stood in place and just waited for the enemy to hit me, bullets wizzing around me, the enemy acting like some stormtrooper wannabe, without landing a shot despite me just watching him fire in my direction for a good 2-3 minutes.
Stealth is laughable. Glue yourself to walls or bushes to stay hidden and play red light/yellow light with your "objective sense" while you murderize the people around you that you can't bring into the bushes so you're undetected. Nope. you just leave them out in the path for everyone to see. At one point, the whole charade falls apart as you "hide from pirhanas in the "water bushes" while sneaking by them...Yes. you play hide and go seek with fish.
The objective sense is clearly a crutch for a game that couldn't do enough graphically to make it's game world both engaging AND functional, so instead you just spend your whole game MASHING Q so you can figure out where you're going or where the latest collectable is so you can upgrade your weapons. "but Upgrading weapons and having their visual appearance change was a big part of the previous game!" I hear you say. Correct! But in this game, most of the upgrades do little to change how the weapon feels, or acts, or looks. It's just "the hammer is now hollow! look. you can see it on the inspect scene!".
And finally the story, While the original idea is reasonably serviceable, it's plagued by the narrative device of "phoning it in". You meet someone, they tell you to not piss them off, you piss them off and then 30 seconds later they're telling you their life story and helping you commit war crimes cause "they love you so much" (not really, but that's how it feels.) The enemy is always a step ahead, while also being behind, and you're the plucky adventurer who can do it all and yet is responsible for everything and got all her weapons "samus-aran-ed" away from you by $CALAMITY_OF_OPPORTUNITY. Heck, at times Lara is brutally mauled by some random animal or event, and then she shrugs it off by the next cutscene, like suddenly she's healed from getting a jaguar bite to the shoulder. Either Lara is literally made of adamantium, or that Jaguar was only gently holding her while it DRAGGED HER THROUGH THE UNDERBRUSH.
That's not to mention the whole chapter of the game where you just play "child endangerment simulator" as she waltzes around the outside of the Croft Manor. Look. nobody's gonna miss the small child destroying your property values while trying to play Santa Claus. Not unless dear old daddy Croft really was as detached as mom said.
Look. I REALLY wanted to enjoy this game. And I don't hate for whoever spent the time making the Definitive Edition. It's really hard to polish something that was lackluster in the first place. This game really feels like they pulled an Ubisoft and was required to pump out their once yearly "long-running game franchise entry" instead of putting any soul into it. So you have a game that you can play, but...that's about it. It's the gaming equivalent of wonderbread. Offensive to nobody because it's the consistency of cardboard but with no flavor. It feels like the lady version of Prince of Persia: Warrior Within, but with less death metal, and in that game saving could corrupt your save file locking you out of the ending of the game the lack of polish was so bad.
You deserve better than Shadow of the Tomb Raider, I deserve better than Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Lara and Crystal Dynamics and the legacy that predate this game deserve better than Shadow of the Tomb Raider. It just sucks we didn't get it.