Shadow of the Tomb Raider

Looks pretty much the same. They talk a lot about stealth mechanics and it's hilarious how excited they sound while explaining really standard stealth, making it sound like they're all new, revolutionary mechanics. Could be good though.

I remember playing the first and feeling it was quite generic, even for its time. So far it looks more or less the same. I miss Lara from Legends. That was such a fun action adventure game. Had a blast playing that one. You ever played it?

Yeah I didn't mind that one.

Quite a few extensive gameplay videos out now.

So far it looks decent. I'll definitely be playing it but will rent and see if it's actually worth owning.

One big thing they've added is the ability to swim underwater as you please, so exploration is seriously expanded with this. Funny though, something in an ancient PS1 game doesn't make it into the current gen version until the third game.

The friendly imp has gone through the whole game again with his bucket of white paint, marking every climbable ledge. Spidey sense still in and as dumb as ever.

I really hope they remove the auto-grab shit. I hate that. Holding a button down at all times in the old games really made it feel more risky. If you released the button you dropped instantly. It was because YOU that was holding on. In recent games it does it all for you.

Edit: I'm so happy. I just watched a review that shows how when you start you can ramp up the difficulty in general, puzzles, and exploration. Boosting exploration removes the white paint bullshit. This video goes over it and is pretty funny too.

something in an ancient PS1 game doesn't make it into the current gen version until the third game.

I remember when ledge-takedowns, a method of stealthkilling since day one in the genre, was applauded in Assassins's Creed 2's reveal. People are mindless sheep.

I really miss 3d platforming though. The auto climbing Uncharted introduced is everywhere. Tomb Raider Legends, Prince of Persia Sands of Time, God of War 1, now that's platforming. Love that, miss it :/

At least we can remove the white paint now. I'm going to put all the settings at their hardest level. Should be fun.

I don't like what he said about the spidey sense in combat. He said yellow means you can stealth kill them but red means they are in line of sight of others? Was this in Rise? I never used it.

Awful mechanic. Just how dumb are gamers these days?

We live in a day and age where Nintendo doesn't believe kids are smart enough to bring a Pokemon with a type advantage to a Gym, thus forcing players to have one otherwise they can't enter. Or that Furi got a mode that makes you fully invincible so you can 'experience the story'.

We are beyond redemption.

Now I remember. I saw this color coding thing in one of the Arkham games.

No need to observe your enemy! At the press of the button they all become traffic lights!

You mean Detective Vision? I hated that trend. I liked it a bit in Arkham but it quickly made you use it the whole game which was a big waste of the beautiful game. Hitman even used it at one point: heresy.

Yeah.
Basically it's not that bad but when it even indicates whether or not someone is safe to stealth kill, that's ridiculous.

This means you don't have to observe your enemies at all. Just stare at a red guy until he goes yellow then stealth attack him.

Sure I'll never use it but shit like this teaches people to be stupid and conditions them to this type of auto gameplay.

That's basically modern gaming 101 now though sadly. 2kGames made a statement recently about how gamers don't have the time or patience to 'climb to the top', and thus microtransactions help. I wonder how long it will be before we can pay extra to have the game play itself (basically turning it into a very expensive film).

So there's a season pass. 7 tombs, 7 weapons and 7 skills.

Looks like a rental or buy used and wait for complete edition.

About to start. Here's the difficulty info.

You can set combat, exploration and puzzle difficulty from easy to hard. You can mix and match which aspect you want to be easier or harder. If you set the overall difficulty to 'Deadly Obsession', everything gets set to very hard. I will only list what hard offers and what VH adds in bold.

Combat
*No health regen in combat. Ammo boxes are rare.
*No hit marker on reticle.
*Enemies have increased health, do more damage, and locate Lara more quickly.
*Enemies are not highlighted in Survival Instinct.

Exploration
*No white paint on critical path. Reduced saving grab timer.
*No survival instinct during exploration.
*Base camps are unlit and require resources to light. Game only saves at base camps.

Puzzle
No hints given by Lara. No Survival Instinct. Shorter window of opportunity for timed mechanics.

I think I'll go with hard as difficulty wise it's identical. I hate mechanics that mess with saving like TEW2 classic mode. I can't always be sitting here waiting for the next save point.

If you have a save from the previous games you get a ton of costumes. They are all the ones from the previous reboot games (including some color swaps and a few I don't remember), and also from the old ones. But for some reason the old ones are blocky models, only smoothed out (don't know the wording for this process). They look pretty stupid and I don't think this is what fans meant when they said they wanted the old costumes.

So far the exploration is good. You really have to use your eyes to find stuff, though getting up close to something still shows a little icon. Survival Instinct is totally dead, so you have to spot animals on sight.

There are still those upgrade trees. A lot of the same but also some new stuff. I'm focusing on stuff that helps me avoid firefights. I've got silent landing, and some skills that let me use poison. You can craft poison arrows but they're called Lure Arrows. I don't have any yet but as I understand it, you don't shoot enemies directly, rather shoot them nearby and as the name suggests, lure them over. Once close enough, the arrow will explode with a poison cloud that doubles as a smoke bomb. This is how the description makes it sound.

There's also some kind of poison grenade.

The other skill I bought lets you harvest beetles or spiders for poisons to craft this stuff.

I fought the jaguar boss (two of them actually) and that was decent. The area has a few exits in the walls that only the jaguar can climb into and use, then pops out from another. I was pleased to see fire arrows have the effect of setting it alight and stopping it in its tracks.

So far lots of forced walking crap.

Not enjoying this.

It's a repeat of Rise. I'm not going to say what you encounter, unless anyone actually asks, but it's like they have a template, just set in a different country.

What I will say though, had to do this flashback of Lara as a kid at her mansion, and it was AWFUL.

Will go over how I feel about this game and series. Spoilers ahead.

Finished the main campaign. Didn't go after any side content. Not searching for some native kid's dice for him. Little shit.

If you've played Rise, the structure is identical. The town is bigger and there's two I think but I was running through not caring. You can do side missions but I had no interest.

Didn't do any hidden tombs or crypts. Just ran through the story skipping what I could. It seemed really random about what could be skipped. Some cutscenes could, and some couldn't.

The forced walking was horrendous.

The open areas are bigger this time. Hunting is still in but I barely upgraded.

There was some cool stuff like the jaguar fear arrows. They make an enemy go crazy and start shooting in every direction. Seems to have rules though. Like if there is more than one enemy nearby, the afflicted will only kill one of them before dying himself. I guess this is fair, otherwise you'd be able to wipe out entire groups with one dart from your perch in a tree.

You really have to hunt down resources to make these arrows. It might have been the fact that I was on hard mode and resources were scarce, and I didn't unlock the whole skill tree because quite a few skills are locked with challenge tombs. These arrows are broken as hell though. Having any more of them would remove any semblance of challenge, which as it stands, is no difficult task.

There is NO enemy variety. Soldiers, native warriors, and these weird mutant looking ones that resemble orcs and climb around like monkeys. Exactly the same as previous games.

This is the format that pisses me off. They were introduced the same way as the Oni and Deathless. A trail of soldier corpses, screams heard in the distance or over radio, blood trails, and then a brief glimpse. Later you find that while they're not exactly human (well, technically I think they are, just deformed and feral), they're still humanoid, and behave the same way as other enemy types. Boring.

Where are all the cool creatures from the old games?

Then you have all the forced, high speed running and jumping sequences where everything is exploding around you, and the huge shootout at the end, followed by a crappy final boss that was just a predator encounter.

I was so hoping for dinosaurs this time. Given the location, it's the perfect place for them. But no, that might be too much fun.

What's really insulting is that in a flashback to kid Lara, she's drawing a picture. Her mother asks what it is. We see the drawing and Lara replies that it's her and her mum chased by a T-Rex in Egypt.

A T-rex.
In Egypt.

That's got to be trolling. Fuck you devs.

There's also a T-Rex skeleton in her mansion. If you go up to it you can interact and get a comment, as you can do with all the displays and artifacts there. I forgot what she said but all I heard was, "Look! A T-Rex skeleton, exactly like the ones you WON'T be seeing in this game."

I was pissed in TR Anniversary too. I was so looking forward to that dinosaur stage. Dinosaurs are one of my fears, but here it was this awful, on-rails boss fight thanks to that garbage enemy aggression system.

The reason the encounter in the first game was so fantastic was because of the intro, and the fact that the T-Rex could freely move throughout the stage. You actually had the option to fight and kill it, or try to beat the stage while avoiding it.

There were cheap ways to do this, like standing in a tunnel entrance shooting, then retreating into the tunnel when it got too close. If you were in a place it couldn't go, it would retreat to a another part of the stage, out of sight, to prevent you from shooting it freely from safety.

You could opt to fight it head on, which was super dangerous because it could kill you instantly if you were standing in front of it. One lunging bite and that was it. You had to keep running and jumping to one of its sides so it had to keep trying to turn to face you and couldn't get a lock for its bite attack. At first I did it with the shotgun, but then wanted to challenge myself and use just the handguns.

Beating the stage without fighting it was another experience. As soon as you left whatever cover, it would know and immediately move to your position. You'd here those classic Jurassic Park stomps as it got closer. Terrifying.

You had to figure out exactly where you needed to run. There were some places were you could swim where you were safe so you could make for those parts, wait for it to leave, then continue. You also had to be careful of the raptors that prowled this area too.

I'll never forget that encounter. Scared me to death. This was one of the defining moments in gaming for me. Sadly the reboots can't come close to this level. I'll hold out hope that such a thing will be including in the season pass tombs, but this dev team have destroyed my faith in this series. They seem to only care about fancy graphics and explosions.

Oh man, I almost forgot. The climbing. It sucks. Now you get the spiky boots that let you climb on ceilings. I can't see the point of this. So they can design a stage where you have to climb upside down? It's just dumb. Some of these climbing sequences went on for so long they might as well have been cut-scenes. Is this nonsense really what people want?

I heard a lot of similar complaints from other players and even streamers. Game seems very by the numbers, but also lacking in what it needs (combat). 

One thing I did find funny was people complaining about the hardest difficulty being, well, hard. That's the point right?

From what I can gather it really is more of a 'modern AAA' game than a old-style Tomb Raider title. I only ever played Legacy and Anniversary and loved Legacy the most. Just fun dialogue, good platforming, fun combat, derpy enemies and dinosaurs and god knows what else. Always had a blast playing those games.

I assume all the T&A outfits are missing this time around too?

Yeah no swimsuit or anything like that. Just the ones I mentioned.

That reminds me. I have this perverted friend and way back when he unlocked the swimsuit in Legends I think, he took her to Croft Manor and spent a seriously long time in corners messing with the camera angle while beating the meat. I know this because I saw him doing it and he didn't care. Total freak.

There are far less fights and more focus on puzzles. Was combat a complaint with the previous games? I remember complaints about not enough tombs.

That mud mechanic is dumb but could have been awesome. You enter an area with enemies and there will be mud patches and vine walls to hide in. The game says it's harder for them to see you with mud on and they now have that same Assassin's Creed icon that fills when you're in line of sight but at a distance, then goes red if they actually spot you.

The problem I have is that mud is essentially scripted. It will only appear in these areas, as will all the stealth options like mud and vine walls. Feels very limited.

Even an old game like MGS3 has far more stealth variety with camo paint and outfits, and that enemies can be wandering around more areas.

As for difficulty, I could not believe that complaint. The game is easier than anything. The highest difficulty is a complete joke. When you get shot it still takes ages to die and stealth is insanely good. You now have double takedowns and they even stole Batman's ability to hang enemies, only in TR you get an upgrade to hide the bodies in the tree.

I didn't even do the challenge tombs, sidequests or buy new weapons (there's a shop now). If had, I would have been so overpowered.

I'm hoping so hard the season pass has the lost world.

Also they've removed and extra modes. Rise had Croft Manor and a scoring mode which was cool, as well as the multiplayer Endurance Mode.

> beating the meat
Hilarious, but also wack. Takes me back to my old badminton days, I recalled one set of kids (a few groups lower than me) talking about Dead or Alive Extreme Beach Volleyball and how they just unlocked a bikini that showed more side-boob. Kids were like 10 or 11. Me, the alpha-19 year old, raised an eyebrow haha.

> combat
I don't recall any real complaints other than "why is it different". The rebooted series, to me, always felt it was unnecessarily AAA in terms of content. By the numbers combat, by the numbers metroidvania elements, by the numbers stealth. Only the gore deaths were unique I felt.

I almost vomited when before starting the game, they feel this need to tell you how their team consists of multiple ethnicities and religious beliefs. Why the fuck is that relevant?

Maybe that's why their games suck ass. They probably care more about this than the quality of their members.

More interestingly though, Crystal Dynamics are saying that this will be the first “Tomb Raider” game where the narrative will tackle the political tension at the heart of the series. At the end of the day, Lara Croft is a white woman who tracks down riches and artifacts in other people’s homeland, and in 2018, the social consciousness surrounding those kind of adventure stories has shifted greatly. The developers, of course, are mum on the specifics of the emotional arc in “Shadow of the Tomb Raider,” but they did say that by the end of the game, Lara Croft will be “humbled” in some capacity. I don’t envy the development team; it has to be difficult to re-contextualize a beloved franchise in a way that authentically evaluates its colonial overtones, while still emerging on the other side with a canon they believe in, and a hero worth rooting for. However, it’s not like they had much of a choice. The new game is set in Latin America, ground zero for Western imperialism, and the company is at least self-aware enough to know that they won’t be able to get away without addressing that paradox.

Why point out she's white? What if she was, I don't know, Filipino and searching for artifacts on other countries?

I like this one scene that is such forced shit, where Lara is crying about how she caused this mess and has to fix it and her buddy Jonah tells her it's not all about her (he's brown). You tell that rich white girl!

Everything IS all about Lara though. It's her game, she's the main character, everything that happens is because of her, and she is the subject of many the fap. Hell, Jonah follows HER around the world like a little lap dog.

What about the combat? You kill a quite a lot of these people as a white woman. The people in these tribes are frequently seen murdering and sacrificing each other but no issue there. This political BULLSHIT can go to hell. Done with the reboot TR series.

I don't want to see this forum devolve into talk of politics or its influence on games too much if at all possible. I do on the other hand understand the frustration, and share it. Games as a medium are trying way to hard to appeal to an audience that isn't theirs and is only interested in them for validation, not their product. This is why you see a ton of productions crash and born these days.

The double-sided nature is what makes most of these arguments moot. Battlefield V will be the first game in the series to heavily emphasise blacks, women and handicapped soldiers. This is considered a step forward, but people fail to realize that these characters will be shot to pieces, teabagged and worse just like everyone else. And that is sure to explode in on itself, I can already see headlines stating that players are targeting players using a black-avatar in Battlefield V just to piss people off and how that's racist.

It as at this time I'm reminded of this golden quote from Full Metal Jacket:

You're right. I'm just so annoyed with the direction of the series, but I'll avoid making posts like this again.

Checked up on the season pass stuff since the game has already dropped to $29 here. It's all trash.

Costumes you can't freely use outside of DLC areas, and they included 'classic' but it's just the regular shirt in the same color as the old one, and longs instead of shorts. I guess that teams religious beliefs are against legs.

And STILL no dinosaurs.

When I was reading about the season pass there were more comments about how the DLC doesn't address her damaging stuff in other cultures. Unbelievable. At this rate even if there were another game, it probably wouldn't be allowed to be about raiding tombs. What has the world come to?

Makes me want to buy all the games and record myself wrecking as many things as possible and turn it into a compilation video lol.

The first game was such a good uncharted clone. Had a lot of fun with that title, limiting upgrades though or its just too easy.

Bought Rise one sale hoping for the same fun action game and man, so disappointed. They took out the break neck shooting gallery pace and replaced it with open world bloat. So boring.
I will try shadow maybe if it is less than 10 bucks, but that second game soured me so much.

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In the first reboot I did 100% completion without using the map or survival instinct. Had to search every corner for these tiny items. Was actually pretty good.

I picked up the case for Shadow yesterday and read the back again.

'Become one with the jungle.'

This is complete bullshit. False advertising.

Again, in the more open areas there's no stealth options, humans, or mud and vine walls. Those are only in SOME of the boxed in 'corridors' that pass for 'the jungle'. Scripted encounters where there's mud and vine walls to hide in MAYBE if the devs decided this random encounter not much different from the last has them or not.

What is this? The mud wears off as soon as you leave the box. There's mud everywhere but only certain pools can be used. They promote this jungle camo crap so hard and in the previews went on and on about how great it was and how free you were yet in reality it seems they limit it in the extreme.

The original trailer is better than the actual game.

finished this game on the hardest difficulty. here are my thoughts

PROS:

The game is visually amazing. Lots of stunning vistas.

Tombs and Crypts are fantastic. Way better than previous two games.

DLCs are the best part of this game. Lots of new challenges that involved platforming,puzzles and combat.

combat encounters are short but really enjoyable. There is a lot of freedom in how to tackle the encounters.

Music is good. There aren't many catchy tracks but music complements the action on screen really well.

CONS:

Lots of walking segment. Since the game follows Metroidvania style progression there is a lot of slow walking when moving one from one area to another.
 
The story is contrived,incoherent & dull.

Boring characters - I don't know what the hell were they trying to do with Lara's character in this game or in the previous game. She is a mass murderer in this game and hard to cheer for. Most of the other characters are just unmemorable. This game was developed by Eidos montreal, who also made Deus EX HR & MD, so i don't know why the story and characters are bad.

Skill tree is useless. A lot of the abilities barely make any substantial difference in gameplay.

Final boss is a bullet sponge.

the game has a lot of filler in the form of hunting and collectibles. Same as the previous two games.  

forced specific outfit requirement during certain parts of the story. The said outfits are ugly. Outfits in general are not as cool looking as the previous game.

No score attack mode like the previous game.

Some thoughts i had while playing this game which i think could have made the game better are:

I wish there were more moves lara could learn like punching & kicking. Like a sweep kick, a running punch or slide to bring variety to the combat encounters. This way skill tree could have been more useful.

A greater usage of grappling hook during platforming. It was underutilized IMO.

speeding up the wall climbing climbing animation.

better choreographed takedown animations. Let me Suplex enemies into walls when performing a takedown from the vine walls. Most of the animations involve knife and they are boring to look at.

More combat encounters that involved extensive use of hunting from the trees. Tree climbing is underrated & needs to be in more games. Assassin's creed is the only series i can think of that has tree parkour.

final boss should have made use of all the gameplay elements(puzzle,stealth,platforming,combat) of the game.

More dynamic puzzles. All of the puzzles have a single solution. I would have liked if there were more ways to solve the puzzles.

I really enjoyed this game. Gameplay wise it is definitely the best one from the trilogy. I am hoping for major gameplay change in the future tomb raider games.

I'm curious where you see this game stand in the grander-scheme of the series, have you played the originals as well?

i have only played a little bit of the anniversary. Reboot really drew my attention to the series with its graphics and tone. I am planning on played the old games now that i am done with this trilogy. From what i can remember they are very different from this trilogy. They are much more focused on platforming and supernatural stuff.