Shadow of the Tomb Raider
I’m a fan of the Tomb Raider reboot that’s been running since 2013 through games and comics, but I recognize that it has issues. The biggest problem it has is that Lara Croft is a bad person who’s supposed to be sympathetic and likable. Initially, she was, in fact, likable, in the 2013 release Tomb Raider and early into the run of the comics. However, she very quickly began to actively revel in the acts of violence she regularly commits and grew more and more unabashed in her graverobbing which was questionable from the get-go. The latter is to be expected from a franchise called Tomb Raider, but the former creates a disturbing trend in Lara’s character arc which continues into Shadow of the Tomb Raider, where she is simultaneously a trigger-happy treasure hunter and (supposedly) a noble crusader (with a heavy dose of white savior complex in the mix) against the forces of the antagonistic organization Trinity. There’s not necessarily anything wrong with having a morally grey or outright immoral character as a protagonist, but the presentation of Lara Croft has been muddled since before Rise of the Tomb Raider. Ultimately, the writers can’t seem to decide if they want to portray her as a bad person or not, and it weakens the narrative. It’s hard to sympathize with a character’s struggles when by nature the character is not sympathetic.
The issue of Lara’s morality isn’t just something that pertains to the story, it’s something that bleeds over into gameplay. While in this case, it is the violence that can be waved away – plenty of protagonists casually mow down hordes of enemies, after all – as just a factor of Shadow of the Tomb Raider being a video game, Lara’s tendency towards theft creates an uncomfortable dynamic. In Tomb Raider and Rise of the Tomb Raider, Lara Croft was exploring largely uninhabited areas, but in Shadow there are significant portions of the game that involve populated towns and cities. Despite the people living in the areas being explored, the player is still encouraged to loot resources and bring down destructible parts of the environment to open new paths, which gives the sense that the player – and by extension, Lara – is wreaking havoc on the area. While there were inhabited sections of Rise, the means of interaction in those areas did not feel disruptive on nearly the same level as in Shadow, and the result is a game which feels bad to be playing even as it tries to make the player feel good for these things because of the attempted justification of Lara as the “white savior”.
While I don’t like or feel good playing the exploration segments of Shadow, it’s not all bad. The stealth sections with human enemies are fun and engaging. They are the best part but there are very few of them in the first third-ish of the game (four, to be exact, the first two of which had only four or five enemies each). By the time I gave up on playing, most of what I had done was the exploration and puzzles that I had problems with above.
Beyond these issues, Shadow of the Tomb Raider is a game that does a lot of ridiculous things but tries to pass itself off as serious. The usual traversal segments and set pieces are forgivable since again video game characters are constantly performing impossible acts of acrobatics and athleticism, but there were moments that went too far for me to suspend my disbelief. Two such moments especially stick out in my mind. The first was when Lara was being mauled by a jaguar in a cutscene. Lara was face-down on the ground while the jaguar was on top of her and taking visibly large bites and clawing at her for several seconds, which definitely should have killed her or at the very least injured her to point she could not have continued her adventure. Because this was still early in the game, however, Lara got up, killed the jaguar, made clothes out of its pelt for some reason, and was fine after some light medical treatment in a subsequent cutscene.
The other moment that made me question why I kept playing Shadow of the Tomb Raider was the stealth section where I had to sneak past piranhas.
Finally, I feel obliged to at least make mention of how the game looks good. There were moments where I would be swimming around (through non-piranha-infested-water) and I would notice how the light catching in the water or reflecting off the bottom of the pool was pretty impressive, or I would halt my romp through the jungle for a second and take in the vibrant color palette of the surrounding area. Good graphics may be everywhere these days, but they’re no less pleasing for it when something genuinely looks good.
While technically speaking Shadow of the Tomb Raider is an impressive game, it’s not enjoyable or coherent enough that I can recommend it. Given the inane ways the plot continues Lara’s arc into a violent grave-robber, I can’t think of any reasons you would want to play this game over one of the previous two titles, especially when there were no gameplay improvements from its most immediate predecessor as far as I could tell. If you want to play a good Tomb Raider game, my suggestion is to forego Shadow and just play Rise instead.
