Shadow of the Tomb Raider

Positives. Presentation is excellent, art direction, lighting, cinematics, facial animations. Negatives, bland vanilla AAA game design that's an incoherent mishmash of systems (RPG skill system, crafting, combat and stealth), long on rails stretches where you barely have anything to do but listen to the boring story, the joyless main character.

My least favourite of the 3 games in the franchise reboot. Too much time is spent on running around across the map. Trading and crafting is not well developed and unnecessary. Just make it a natural progress in the game to get better equipment. But worst of all. Story is just not very engaging. “First” game I really wanted to save Sam and get off the island. Here I just didn’t care. Neither story or collecting all artefacts. Visually very well done though.

The grafix is heckin gud. First half of the game is amazing, but later half went to shit. First half: Scripted scenes/clichés, environment interactions, & puzzles has improved a lot. Towns! The world is more believable. The story is intriguing. Second half: They must've ran out of budget/time cuz everything I've said went to the gutter. Other: Bad supernatural enemies. Lots of climbing instead of shooting. Star wars syndrome. Combat feels flat & unsatisfying. Town NPCs voiced by the same person

Looks nice but just dull and generic now.

Really cool, almost feels like a movie. I do think the story in these games can be improved upon still to truly make it something special.

The combat remains the least engaging gameplay element of this series, but just exploring and climbing around was a lot of fun, I'd recommend turning off the pathway indicators in the options. The writing is weak and the side quests/optional dialogue might as well not even be in the game. The villain is pathetic and the love interest is a cardboard cutout only added to distinguish Lara and Jonah as just friends and nothing romantic, as if that needed establishing for some reason.

Same as the other 2. Puzzles and how long the game is usually puts this at a lower rating. However this had a great story to them that it was interesting to follow.

The stealth is wonky and there's no cover button and the side-quests are pretty standard, but if you ignore most of them and just do the story you have a pretty great linear action adventure where the platforming is satisfying and dangerous, there's enough depth to be interesting and the story is completely solid. I was never a fan of Tomb Raider and only played this one and the last one since the reboot but I really like it. Just not perfect.