Shadow of the Tomb Raider (2018)

Il semblerait que je n'ai jamais pris le temps de faire une review des deux premiers opus de cette trilogie reboot de Tomb Raider. Je pense que ce sera chose faite après ce post.

Quand sort Tomb Raider en 2013, les gens sont décontenancés. On y incarne une Lara Croft plus jeune, inexpérimentée, plus fragile. Des efforts ont été faits pour casser son image de pinup du jeu vidéo et attirer un nouveau public. Exit les double gun, cette nouvelle Lara a pour armes de prédilection son arc et des piolets d'escalade. On sent tout de suite une vibe plus "survival". Le coté inexpérimenté de Lara sert de prétexte à l'ajout d'un arbre de compétences façon RPG.

Le jeu marquera les esprits en proposant un coté cinématographique qui était encore innovent à l'époque: beaucoup de cinématiques, beaucoup de QTE qui délimitent des zones couloirs semi-ouvertes qui s'agrandiront tout au long de la trilogie.

Le souci avec ce trope de l'héroïne qui s'endurcit, c'est que ça a ses limites. On ne peut pas lui faire recommencer de Zero à chaque jeu. Même si les zones tuto ont toujours une bonne excuse pour vous faire perdre votre matériel. On repart donc dans une surenchère constante. Lara va redevenir ce parangon du badass qui tue des jaguar de 4m de haut à main nues en se baignant dans le sang de ses ennemis avec la force d'un rituel inca !

Il est moins facile de s'identifier à la Lara de Shadow of the Tomb Raider qu'à celle des précédents jeux. Elle est déjà devenue une légende, son seul lien avec le monde des vivants étant incarné par Jonah, son meilleur ami bon gars qui aurait du resté couché le jour où il a rencontré Lara Croft. Ok les quelques scènes de furie où Lara se retrouve seule contre le monde sont jouissives comme un bon film d'action sous stéroïde mais j'ai beaucoup de mal à être investi émotionnellement.

Ca pourrait d'ailleurs résumer tout le scénario de ce troisième opus: On s'en fout. Des villageois pauvres sont tués à tour de bras mais l'histoire continue car l'objectif n'est pas de sauver un village de pouilleux péruviens mais LE MONDE. Dans le premier jeu de la trilogie, nous avions de l'attachement pour les membres de l'équipe et les voir mourir ou être blessé nous touchait vraiment. Même le méchant du titre, Amaru, à qui on essaie d'installer une backstory ne m'émeut aucunement. Je pense que c'est principalement la faute à un empilement de clichés d'écriture grossiers.

D'ailleurs, pour la première fois, ces clichés font montre d'un ethnocentrisme qui a tendance à me faire tiquer. Le premier jeu se passait au japon, avec à sa tête une équipe japonaise. Les artefacts archéologiques faisaient sens avec les différentes périodes d'occupation de l'île du jeu et étaient traités avec un certains respect (à peu près autant que dans n'importe quel manga). Le deuxième jeu se passait majoritairement dans des vestiges de l'ex-URSS, pas de grandes difficulté, pas grand chose à dire.

Là le jeu décide de fondre ensemble des tribus qui ont évolué à des milliers de kilomètres et 7 siècles d'écart ? En se targuant d'un disclamer comme quoi ils avaient des experts en cultures précolombiennes dans l'équipe ? Mais allez vous faire foutre. Et le coté "J'arrive dans une culture indigène qui a des soucis et je les règle toute seule parce qu'ils sont trop nuls pour le faire eux-même". Ergh ! Come on ! Avoir des personnages racisés au casting ne vous autorise pas à faire des dingueries pareilles ??? Ajoutez en plus toutes les dépictions de la "sauvagerie" des dits peuples: moult rituels sanglants, des pères qui sacrifient leurs enfants, des condamnations sans procès, des villages manipulées sur leurs croyances comme des enfants de 4 ans alors que le jeu nous laisse bien entendre qu'ils sont plusieurs à sortir et rentrer au village et qu'ils connaissent le monde extérieur... On évoquera pas les sauvages mystiques protecteurs de la boite ni le fait que Lara devient la divinité du peuple qui se sacrifie pour elle BREF.

Et c'est dommage. Parce que le coté recherche de documents archéologique, le gameplay autour de l'apprentissage des langues etc ça avait la possibilité d'être un truc cool. De même que le mode immersion où les personnages vous parlent dans leur langue vernaculaire ! (On sent que les locuteurs natif sud-américains ne sont pas des comédiens de doublage par contre...) Idem pour la musique qui nous immerge totalement en Amérique centrale et du sud !

Pour parler du gameplay en lui-même: Shadow of the tomb raider est sorti en 2018. Ca commençait à être un peu tard pour les zones couloirs, l'absence de vrai monde ouvert et autre linéarités... Attention c'est un très très beau monde couloir. Les graphismes sont à couper le souffle sur les zones extérieures. Mais à être autant scripté le jeu en est parfois frustrant. Surtout quand la technique ne suit pas. Il n'y a rien de pire que de mourir 5 fois au même endroit parce que une collision est mal programmée, parce qu'on est éjecté d'une plateforme ou parce qu'on est en avance de 2 frames sur une cinématique non assumée et qu'on se fait tuer par la caméra ! Le système d'escalade super rigide plus d'un an après la sortie de breath of the wild, ça pique un peu.

Pour toutes ces raisons, j'ai pas pu apprécier ce jeu à fond. Et c'est une fin décevante pour une nouvelle trilogie qui avait dépoussiéré le personnage de Lara Croft et donné un nouveau souffle aux jeux d'aventure de l'époque.

Well, Shadow of the White Saviour is over and I think I can confidently say it’s tied for the most loathsome game I played this year. A sheer disappointment of a game full of absolutely insipid critiques of colonialism, cultural theft and Lara as white saviour. I’m struggling to decide which is worse, the hollowing out appropriation of indigenous culture in Horizon Forbidden West or the absolute way Shadow of the Tomb Raider leans heavily into bullshit western conceptions of indigenous mysticism and the presentation of members of an ancient indigenous group as the most stripped down and raw rendition of “savage” possible. It actually makes me queasy to think this is a Canadian made game, but then again when have Canadians even been a friend of indigenous people?

The audacity, making the indigenous character the villain. Nothing like a white hero coming to the rescue of the indigenous people by killing hundreds of other indigenous people. The logic is astounding: only white Lara can save the indigenous civilization from, checks notes, themselves. “But, but the literal “savage” C.H.U.D.S are on the good side at the end, isn’t that a redemption for those characters? Eidos made them heroes too.” No, fuck off. I’m tired of western fucking devs, filmmakers and other storytellers taking indigenous cultures and using them to represent whatever fucking magical, mystical, exotic, kind of scary, maybe honourable, character that’s only their to serve their fantastical storytelling ends. Fuck your “magical Indian” Eidos.

Fuck this game, fuck its terrible ideology, fuck its toothless critique of Lara and the way it wants us to feel bad about her actions only to redeem her at every step along the way. Fuck turning indigenous groups into cavern dwelling zombies. Fuck the fact that the game is so dark you can’t see half the climbing holds in any of the challenge tombs. Fuck the numerous pointless collectables. Fuck the aggravatingly useless skill perks you have to earn like “no longer lose your grip when grabbing ledges”, there only to waste your points and time. Fuck the lacklustre combat. Fuck the pointless weapon upgrades. Fuck the endless side missions that usually lead you to killing more indigenous people. Fuck this awful game.

Playtime: 26h4m (Normal playthrough)

Intro

SOTTR is a third-person action-adventure game in which you travel between areas, kill things, gather resources, solve puzzles and talk to people.

The Good

• It looks great.
• The various locations are beautiful.
• Resources are more plentiful.
• Some nice puzzling and platforming.
• A couple of decent fights.
• Challenge objects get highlighted with the relevant skill.
• Almost no screen shaking (Rise had far too much of it).
• Separate difficulty settings for combat, platforming and puzzling.
• One of the tombs has a really nice horror atmosphere.

The Bad

• You have to kill capybaras. Aw. :-/
• There are super-strong orcs and they never get explained properly.
• The story sucks, as is tradition.
• Several CTDs, again.
• Dying sometimes sets you back way too far (fuck your Jesus puzzle).
• Too much downtime (grinding/trading/talking).
• Challenge tombs still "trap" you in the relevant area until you are done.
• Upgrades still suck and now all weapons have to be upgraded separately (Rise had item classes).
• Far more completely silent melee attackers.
• The bow zooms too much by default and one time you are forced to use it against a bunch of melee guys in a small area - yeah, that sucked hard.
• Lara feels much more frail and they compensate for that with obnoxious boost items.
• Areas are sometimes too dark or too bright.
• Some of the puzzle/tomb solutions are far too vague. E.g. the forge requires you to kickstart the "elevator" and awkwardly jump to a poorly visible point.
• No more destroying parts of enemies' armor, which was fun.
• More QTEs including a really really bad one against a jaguar (suddenly the prompted button changes to E and changes back to F when trying again - wtf?).
• I'm 100% seriously taking orders from a kid? Wat?

The Ugly

• The resource grind feels completely pointless. The only limitation is time. Why not remove all upgrades and use more sparse resources for special ammo and improv weapons?
• Truly obnoxious scripted platforming shit that gets even more obnoxious three games into the series.
• The High Council -the people responsible for everything bad in the series- gets killed offscreen. What. The. Fuck. Imagine if you found out Thanos was dead because you heard it over your walkie talkie.

Conclusion

'Shadow' is very similar to 'Rise', but with a lot less (and worse) combat, and more side-quests that involve talking. These quests generally aren't that interesting and i started installing other games because i missed some action.

Generally speaking it does everything worse than Rise, except for the lack of screen shaking. It fixes none of the problems with the series like annoying travelling, overly scripted gameplay and grinding.

They could fix the first with more fast travel points, including during tombs, and allowing quicktravel in normal areas. Gameplay could be much more interesting if they properly used Lara's tools and skills. Let her set traps. Make stealth more viable. Add proper melee combat. Et cetera. Finally, the weapon system really needs some sort of overhaul. Half of the weapons are non-viable, including all shotguns other than the amazing one you get from DLC (best stats + only silenced one...). Generic upgrades should be removed or implemented in another way that doesn't involve pointless grinding.

Also, if they could just fuck off with the terrible "run from disaster" scripted bullshit platforming that'd be great. Seriously, all three of these games start out as a 4/5 for me until that shit keeps coming up.

Straight up: If this were a movie, my score would be significantly lower. Because of the reboot trilogy, it's probably the worst story. Some of the better and more nuanced character moments, especially with Jonah (who is easily the best part of the game, alongside Umuratu), but a ridiculously culturally insensitive and low-key racist storyline. Not to mention, Lara is irredeemably awful, and they do not really address—emotionally or all that much literally within the story—the fact that she's kiiiiinda responsible for the deaths of hundreds of innocents. Sure, Trinity might've reached the dagger first and fucked things up similarly but that's kinda moot—fact is, the game just doesn't reckon with the fact that Lara really, really, deeply sucks as a person. Like, more here than in any other entry (well, I can't speak to Angel of Darkness because I didn't play that shit, but whatever—she's at least worse here than in the other games in this trilogy or any of the original PS1 games).

So why am I giving this a higher score than Rise of the Tomb Raider? Frankly, I didn't much like playing that one. Her move set was not terribly intuitive and the story there, too, was kinda shit. Also, there were just too many collectibles and what felt like very pointless missions. Here, much of that felt changed for the better. The missions were still largely pointless, but they added more flavour. The villain was more interesting, too. Mostly, though, it's that this is just so, so much more enjoyable to play. Lara moves smoothly, and the puzzles and encounters are a lot more intuitive throughout. Additionally, unlike Rise, the final boss sequence/fight in this game isn't total shit that kills your overall love for a thing right near the finish line (I loathed the entire final sequence in the previous game). The game is also gorgeous, though its soundtrack is about as unmemorable as the last two games.

Of the reboot trilogy, this comes the closest to the Uncharted-ing of Tomb Raider, for better or worse. In terms of action and visuals, it's at time neck and neck. The thing that keeps holding these games back, however, is... just shit writing and characterization. They do not have any sort of feel for Lara—never have, really. At least with Drake in Uncharted they eventually reckon with his selfish shittiness. Here, they just sort of hand-wave it away. And in the end, that keeps me at a distance, emotionally speaking.

I'm glad I played through this trilogy, but I feel like I'm just done now with the character of Lara Croft in general. At this point it would take a new team and a massive upheaval/reboot of her character to get me interested in another entry in this series.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider is a fantastic high quality game that features a great narrative, story and amazing artwork. The game has a nice exotic feel to it, and you can do many cool things such as wandering around in jungles, fighting jaguars, discovering rare animals and swimming in deep underwater caves. Laras' enemies look quite threatening, which makes them fun to defeat and really shows just how badass Lara is as a character. She makes many new interesting acquaintances and forms deep bonds with some of them. My personal favourite character design is Crimson Fire. She is super stunning.

Although the game is awesome in most ways, there are also a few negative things I'd like to point out.

For one, there are so many things that you can do in the game, such as completing side missions, buy stuff from merchants and fast travel in base camps, that you are likely to get thrown off of the games main objective at times, and find yourself spending hours on random side missions that will only grant you a skill upon completing. Therefore I would personally recommend just sticking to the games main story opposed to focusing too much on completing side missions, and just do a few of them every once in a while if you feel like it.

Other than it being a little confusing at times, it is still one of my favourite video games. I highly recommend.

I was one of those people that complained about the first game's narrative as well as its focus on combat. Knowing what to expect, Rise won me over and I learnt to love its fun, scrappy combat and adored its abundance of tombs. Shadow manages to feel like a major pivot as well as more of the same.

One thing that has remained consistent throughout the trilogy for me is my indifference towards Lara. It is partly the writing, but I also feel like Luddington doesn't bring much to the role and find most of her line-readings incredibly flat. I really hope they recast with an older, more interesting Lara in the future. I also find most of the storytelling, especially the Trinity stuff, really dull. It doesn't help that all three games feel very similar structurally.

Weirdly, despite not caring about the protagonist or story, I love this game. A lot. I really love this damn game.

Why? It's simple. More tombs, more traversal and less combat. The tombs are so enjoyable that I immediately bought the dlc just to have more puzzles to solve. The final puzzle of the epilogue dlc is particularly good and it made me angry that there weren't more like it in the rest of the game (it involves moving the limbs of a very large statue). Actually, all the dlc is pretty solid, though they mostly blur together.

I also adore the discreet difficulty settings. It meant I could ramp up the puzzles and exploration to hard, while keeping the combat manageable. The lack of combat is the major pivot for this trilogy (or atleast a return to its roots). Lengthy, scrappy shootouts have been replaced by shorter, intense stealth encounters. You can smear mud on yourself to blend into walls. So if you want to smear mud on your ass, smear mud on your ass - just be honest about it.

Anywho, the traversal is also better than ever. It is more of the same, but they have added a couple of new abilities like rappeling. It is slow and methodical, but I find it very satisfying.

The environments are gorgeous. The jungle of Peru feels vibrant and alive with animals and dense plant life. There are plenty of notes related to the Fawcett expeditions in the first half, which is something that appeals to me. Finding Jack Fawcett's final note in the abandoned villlage hit me a lot harder then it was probably intended to.

The game's other major flaw is its pacing, with the Paiti section feeling particularly slow. It is a gorgeous city, worth taking your time with to see how its people live, resulting in some quality virtual tourism. Unfortunately there are the sidequests. They feel like well-intentioned attempts to expand upon your understanding of Paiti's culture and inhabitants, but are absolutely no fun. I wish they had tied them into the crypts and tombs like the dlc did.  This section drags out, and by the time I left the story had lost any sense of momentum.

There are some other issues: a pointless upgrade system, as well as the option to have everyone speak their native language, which is nice but somehow makes everything feel more stilted. If they wanted it to work they needed to fully commit to it, rather than just jumping back to English at weird intervals. Hopefully they develop this in a later game.

Still, I liked this game, and having now enjoyed this whole trilogy, as well as CD's previous one, I look forward to Lara's future adventures. Or maybe it is time for more Anniversary-style remakes of older games. As long as there are puzzles to solve and stuff to climb I'll be happy.

I was so excited going into this game. Heck, even the options had me excited. They discreet difficulty settings for Combat, Exploration, and Puzzles! They have the option to have characters speaking their native language so that they're not inexplicably speaking English despite being isolated from the rest of the world for hundreds of years! Boy, this'll be a great game, thought I.

And it started out great too. The character of Jonah was completely redesigned so that he actually had an identity and a personality, and played a larger role in the story. Granted, it also opens up the game to criticisms of having the exoticized sidekick of color playing second fiddle to the white protagonist, but at least he's not a blank slate whose only job is to occasionally express concern for our protagonist's well-being. Another noticeable change is that Lara takes photos instead of things, so now she's not just randomly stealing an entire museum's worth of cultural artifacts.

But the best part of the first section of the game is that, when she does actually take a thing, she faces consequences. Big consequences. She learns that you can't just rummage through another culture's stuff and take whatever you want just because you want to solve an exciting mystery. It's great. And then when she tries to make it all about her Jonah calls her out on it, which is also great.

And that's about when the game stops being great. Partially, the game just got too big for its britches, which is understandable. They felt like they needed to keep scaling up, so they introduced a merchant system and a bunch of people to talk to and a crap-ton of side quests, and it all just feels like a bit too much. The visceral human vs. nature aspect that I liked so much from the first game is significantly watered down by the presence of not one but two populated cities. Also, I'm not sure why, but the skill tree just didn't feel as interesting in this game as it did in the last one. And it seemed like most of the rewards for completing tombs were minor boosts to existing abilities rather than new ones. (Also, for some reason if you get the GotY or deluxe edition or whatever, you just get all of the best weapons and outfits right from the beginning, so crafting is essentially useless until late in the game when it's possible to improve some of the basic weapons past the point of their special counterparts.)

But also a lot of the things I liked at the start get lost. Turns out the language settings only apply to anyone who isn't part of the main storyline. And Lara just starts taking things again, for no apparent reason. And funnily enough the issue of race and colonialism didn't really come up in the previous game, set in the Siberian wilderness, but is completely unignorable (and yet largely unaddressed) in this game set in Peru. And the story was kind of convoluted. And then it ended with Lara participating in an ancient ritual where she embodies a god, which was so supposed to be done by someone actually of that culture who died protecting Lara and it just gets real problematic.

And then there's that pointless post-credits scene that just makes it that much worse.

There's probably stuff I'm forgetting, but I got bored about 60% of the way through the game and for the most part stopped caring enough to keep track of what I did and didn't like.

There some good puzzles though. The puzzles were probably the best part.

Shadow of the TR had the unfortunate fate, as did other games, of being released near RDR2, & seemed to be quickly forgotten, but I've enjoyed the new Tomb Raider series. They have a lot of neat aspects, some borrowed from Uncharted or the older Tomb Raiders, some new.

The gameplay here hasn't changed much since the Reboot or Rise. Well, the mechanics haven't changed, save for adding a rappelling feature, but the mix of the 3 different gameplay staples have shifted. I think you can count the combat encounters on one hand. Which means most of the game is made up of puzzles and climbing. It's good they are focused on not just being a shooting gallery, but they may've went too far in the other direction. A few fights in the middle would've helped liven up the game & make it feel longer.

That is one issue I've had with the new series. While the open world is a cool concept, it makes us feel like we're jumping into this adventure story at the 3rd act mark. It wasn't as bad in Siberia, but Peru isn't as lucky. The game seems to move at a quick pace, it's short, and it all seems like one, long third act. A little more globetrotting would do this series good, even if they create three little hub worlds that you can still explore in a free-form fashion. Still, a positive of the open world with little villages and towns, you feel like you're searching for real history in a real world, not just showing up to nice set piece temples like in the older games.

A deeper look into the story, and as such spoiler time, brings up more issues I have. Lara is trying to stop Trinity, as you do, and steals a knife from a Mexican temple where we met the leader of Trinity. There's not as much fanfare as I would expect at seeing the leader of this secret organization that has dogged Lara for the last two games. I think you learn he's the big cheese in a side note. And this guy, Dr. Dominguez, has a whole host of other issues. He's originally from a lost Inca civilization that still exists as a stone age-esque culture. One you visit in the game and serves an important plot point. My suspension of disbelief couldn't extend to a kid from a lost village to being the leader of a pseudo-Christian organization, even if they add in the point he lived away from the village most his life. It's all a little too convenient for me. And you never see the rest of the Trinity Council, they get killed off screen at the end. Just one scene of a bunch of poorly lit dudes in a dark room is all I would've needed to help sell the sort of all reaching nature of Trinity.

Again, the story follows some of the same bullet points of the previous two. One plot twist that bucked the trend is the supernatural cursed peoples all these games have, you actually work with them at the end instead of fighting them like the Oni or the Greek Fire dudes. And they never really explain all the backstory to these, I called them the Descendants.

The part of these games I enjoy the most is collecting the artifacts & journals. They give you a little history & stories of past explorers that tie into your adventure. In the past games, the journals you'd find were read in the voice of the writer, in this game, Lara reads everything. I don't know if they chose this because it was more realistic or they wanted to save a buck on hiring VAs, but it was a bad choice. Lara's actress is very spotty in her performance, the big set piece moments she does great, you see her being a little more Nate Drake-ish as she really owns her role as a treasure hunter now, but in the in-game cutscenes and journal reads, she's completely lifeless & monotone. It isn't helped in the cutscenes that her face doesn't really move, an eyebrow raise would've done wonders.

All in all, I do hope to see Tomb Raider go on, the games are still fun to play and now that Trinity is dead, they have a little more story freedom I'd assume. And Tomb Raider doesn't have to be some big, world changing game, sometimes it's okay to just be a fun game.

Also, what happened to Sam? I enjoy Jonah's character, but it is weird we hardly see any reference to any of the previous characters.

When I played Tomb Raider 2013, the parts I loved were the combat, traversal, and Lara's vindictive nature. She was one of the few video game characters that seem to get some satisfaction out of killing people that come for her. After that game, I remember hearing people complaining about the combat and asking for more tombs. I thought that was strange since the tombs didn't really make much of an impression on me. Rise of the Tomb Raider added more tombs to the game along with open areas and side quests. I didn't like any of that. That stuff was boring compared to the combat from the main story. I was disappointed with this game. In Shadow of the Tomb Raider, they cut way back on the combat and put focus on traversal and tombs. Even when there was combat, it was stealth focused instead of all out firefights. The change didn't bother me as much because it just feels like a different game. Also, the tombs were better.

I love the new additions to traversal. The rappelling, swinging, wall-running, and climbing on the ceiling is fun. Feels like some proper advanced rock-climbing. I'm itching to hop back into this game and do some more.

The disappointing part of this game was the story. To be fair, the story of Tomb Raider games have never been good, but I got excited about the story of Shadow unlike the other games. It sounded like they were going to challenge Lara's obsession with avenging her father. Turn this motivation into a problem that is damaging her life and the lives of others. But the game seems to think Lara's actions are justified even when she's being a self-absorbed asshole. At one point, she pretty much says that her father's life was more important than the people of Paititi in an argument with the games villain. I was waiting for the game to point out how ridiculous she sounds, but it keeps moving like that was a reasonable response. The other thing that seems odd about that, is that Lara doesn't seem to realize that her father wasn't a good man. He stole artifacts from indigenous people and then was going to reveal the location of Paititi when people from Paititi begged him not to.

Overall, I enjoyed this more than Rise of the Tomb Raider, but Tomb Raider 2013 is still my favorite of the three.