Shadow of the Tomb Raider (2018)

Не осилил.

Опять тоже самое: метроидвания, тупой сюжет, страдания и лудо-нарративный диссонанс. Вот только в этот раз сместили акценты и всё сломалось — играть стало тупо скучно.

В игре просрали стрельбу, причём на нескольких уровнях сразу. Во-первых, целиться почему-то неудобно. Прицел двигается либо слишком резко, либо, со сглаживание мыши в настройках, — слишком плавно. Во-вторых, перестрелок в игре стало слишком мало. А баланс навыков и оружия под это никто не менял. Зато можно обмазываться грязью и прятаться в зарослях, растущих на стенах. Вот только зачем мне тогда все боевые навыки и большой арсенал с прокачкой пушек?!

Многие хвалят гробницы, мол они стали больше и интереснее. Неа. Загадки остались такими же простыми, но стали нудными и не всегда очевидными. Если раньше ты сразу понимал, что надо делать, то здесь можно просто не заметить нужный уступ, потому что читаемость окружения стала в разы хуже. Не знаю как этого добились. Конечно, можно по отдельности настроить сложность загадок, исследования и боёв, но... Нахер надо, всё равно скучно играть.

This was supposed to be the culminating part of the new Tomb Raider series. The final and the best. Unfortunately it’s not and it’s a dissapointment. Not a bad game, though I was expecting more.

On a visual and game play level this is pretty much the same thing as the previous titles. If you have not played the previous ones - it’s technically not necessary to play them but I would advise doing so as the game touches on a lot previous events specifically touching on the ongoing Lara’s fight against the Trinity.

This time the adventure will take Lara to South America and she’ll get to explore some ancient mayan tombs. The story is not better and not worse from the previous - a standard save the world kind of thing. I do however feel that Trinity as an organisation looks a bit silly in this installment. From a powerful secret organisation it’s reduced to what’s shown here (as not to spoil some parts of the story).

Lara does what Lara always does. Climbing, running, fighting, hunting - the usual stuff.

How is it different from the past ones? The setting is nice. Many annoying underwater sections. Climbing has been a little refined with some new abilities. The stealth feels a little bit better than previously. Puzzles are fine. Skill tree is a huge misunderstanding. Too few challenge tombs in the base game - best part of the game hidden in the season pass. Cool escape the flood sections - nice looking and entertaining. Claustrophobic sections of squeezing through tight spaces making you feel really uncomfortable - cool.

So what’s bad? Too many water levels. Even more so - the water levels have air pockets where you can take a breath and go on - but the moment you do that the camera changes from back to front to show the animation of reaching for breath. What it does is that it confuses you which way you were going and where you should go which made me swim back a couple of times. Because everything looks the same underwater.

Also the jumping is bad. Especially the more cinematic ones - sometimes I couldn’t make the jump that I thought was obvious and searched for alternatives wasting some time. Other times a jump that looks impossible even within game standards is doable and Lara at times seemed to magnetically attracted to the ledge in an unnatural way.

And last thing - skill tree. Weird looking with a lot of useless skills. The game has little to no hunting yet a whole section almost devoted to animal hunting - why? The skills themselves feel weak and I’ve just spent points to get rid of the exclamation mark on the camp menu.

Don’t get me wrong - it’s a really good game. Not the best in the series for sure - but still a solid title worth picking up.

Oh - and so I don’t forget - this game has the most ridiculous Rambo style scene featuring Lara which makes no sense but is so cinematically awesome yet cheesy that I’d hesitate calling it the best moment of the entire series.

So, there's this town in the middle of the peruvian jungle just next to old incan temples. The town was a turistic spot a few decades ago, then it was in the middle of a petroleum operation... and you're telling me that the temples are unexplored?

This is nonsensical. The two previous Tomb Raider actually made an effort to avoid discrepancies like those. What happened?

Shadow of the Tomb Raider is a beautiful game to spend hours exploring and scrimmaging around for artefacts, documents and caches. There is no question that this is an extremely visually appealing game from the lush forests and mountain ranges to creepy dank crypts and awe inspiring temples and tombs. Swimming feels smooth and the challenge tombs are well constructed and take a bit of thinking with out being ridiculously hard. I had a fantastic time exploring through the areas offered in this game.

The gunplay felt tight and I felt like a god in the shadows when using stealth its just a shame that by the time I reached the end of the game I felt like I had barely even got into the action. And worse yet now the story is over aside from starting a new game there is no optional fights to found. This is quite disappointing I feel like they gave us the tools from a great action packed experience then hardly used them.