The worst part of the story was that at the beginning of the game, Lara was super obsessive and was responsible for the deaths of thousands as a result of initial actions, and never suffers any consequences for it. By the end, we're led to believe that the real point of the story was to let go of her parents, all the while, we never see Lara become the Tomb Raider. She never wields dual pistols. She never becomes the Tomb Raider from Legend/Anniversary at all. In fact, outside of these plot problems, she is basically the same character we saw in Rise. I thought the whole point of this trilogy was to take us on a journey to Tomb Raider: Legend. This is a huge architecture problem, and makes the trilogy very unsatisfying. As an aside, Rise had a much better story by miles and miles. They changed writers, and it shows.
Honestly i never understood why this Trilogy was called Tomb Raider. In the first game she literally confirms she hates Tombs. I can understand the opinion the old Lara was perhaps made to sexy and unrealistic. But how does this Lara compare in any way to her. Did she become a Nun or something. The only reference we got in this trilogy to the old Lara is her name and a scene where she is seen holding dual pistols. That's it. Ohw right and the neverending daddy issues. Almost forgot those. Crystal Dynamic seems to have a really hard time letting things go. At least the Lara from the first 4 games was badass. Did not take crap from no one and showed she was her own woman. The daddy thing worked for Legend untill Underworld. But please enough is enough. This Lara does not even have half the boobs the old one had but yet she can never walk with her shoulder straight. Replaced by a tiresome weight of sorrow even she can't carry anymore. The first game was promising. But i can't even bring myself to play Rise anymore. Give us Tombs,A badass Lara Croft and a new Plot. God knows she needs it.
worst thing about this whole reboot is that Tomb Raider fans are fighting each other in 3 directions. with a slight odd group of people that likes all of them. because they literally just made Tomb Raider into something completely different like if Mario suddenly started saying i hate muchrooms and now im gonna fuck shit up im gonna kill 1000 bowsers and fuck Princess Peach because thats the new me. then starts commensing operation with Sergeant Luigi also btw what is up with this stupid cap i am wearing i always hated red... thats what Tomb Raider Reboot did to Tomb Raider fans. Thanks square enix and crystal dynamics... thx a lot.
On one hand, I feel bad for those who played the new games and never touched the actual Tomb Raider games, those made in the 90s. On the other hand, I'm glad these shady developers are being ridiculized and rejected by the same new audience they have tried to chase by stripping the franchise of everything that made it great in the first place.
These game developers for this game absolutely suck ballz. Like it's one thing to have a game that's challenging and fun like Uncharted. It's another thing when every fkin two steps you're falling off some got damn cliff, or have to put 20 arrows into a freaking jaguar before it fks off and dies. These stupid developers must of never touched a gun before in their lives. Bunch of soy neck beards through out all gaming companys. A bullet will put a person down even if they're wearing a vest. It'll break ribs, However it seems you have to always put a quarter of a clip into an NPC at any given time for them to finally go down. In Shadow of the tomb raider they give Lara a shot gun, and she's shooting slugz at those inbred things in the tomb. Do you know what one blast of a slug would do to flesh and bones? Instead we're left with all these inbreds or monsters still coming after you even though you put 3 slugz in them. It's not fun. I honestly don't know where they get these developers from. Like two scratches will make the screen turn black and white like Lara is in critical condition, but one slug wont put a whole through one of those monsters' chest. It's so stupid. This game starts out fun, but then you realize from the start you're just going to keep dying and dying and dying and dying and dying AND FKING DYING AND DYING SOME FKING MORE. Maybe if you play the game a few dozen times you'll finally have it memorized, but whatever. you're right these developers fking suck, and so does who ever ok'd this b.s.
and Lara lied to the queen about taking the box for herself when it is quite evident she does by seeing it displayed on the desk in her office in the post-end credit scene.
I also just love that moment when there's like half a second where the barrier disappears completely before it tumbles down : D I think it's a glitch that always happens if you have the "Detective Vision" on.
Yeah I feel like tomb raider 2013 and rise beat this game bc square enix actually put a little effort to this game shadow however was a little fun in the beginning but then it feels like the game got lazy and just didn't care I wish this game was better.
Man, the jump at 10:33 ... Oh my god I almost gave up the game. I tried it like at least 100 time, no exaggeration. (PS I am a hardcore TR fan, playing on some pretty awesome PC.) I even had a thought of finding a savegame after this point since there was no progress for me. Lucky enough I somehow made it. It was weird. Nice video btw
Just finished it, and damn, even compared to TR2013 and Rise, this game is rough. Some of this is definitely due to elements born in TR2013 persisting with no logical change (starting with no skills, no equipment, etc), while the rest is just poor gameplay and story decisions, resulting in the game feeing extremely padded out
I actually never played Uncharted because I don't own a PS3 or 4 :D The issue isn't even to me as such whether or not they tried to copy Uncharted, it's more that the series churned out three games so identical in their mechanics and lack of evolution that somehow Rise and Shadow are arguably slightly worse than the first Reboot Tomb Raider. They repeat the same mistakes and sometimes even make the same mistakes bigger.
I didn't like how finding relics or reading monoliths or the murals would stop the game into a menu in order to hear the dialogue. I'd rather have her pick it up or interact with it and continue moving and have the information play out and later have the option in the menu to take a closer look. Also, all the found texts and journals were just read in laras voice would have been nice hearing it in the writer's own voice. Its the same thing with these journals the game pauses and you gotta sit for about 2 min to hear what it says, so a lot of people are just skipping over it. Just keep the game moving and have it play. Don't keep us out of the Tomb Raiding Action!
Isn't the whole magic-thing pretty standard for Tomb Raider? Basically every Tomb Raider i remember had this magical aspect, often you'd have to fight against endbosses who were (partially) transformed to something not-human and the like. Starting with the original Tomb Raider which featured an artifact that created Mutants and the endboss grows wings for the last fight. Interestingly I actually had fairly few technical issues with Shadow, less than Rise. A few visual glitches and weird jumps when jumping in the "wrong" direction, but overall pretty fine. The progression-based obstacles didn't bother me too much personally, but fair criticism, it'd be better to either tie them to something fitting or even get rid of it, it's not really a big upside to need to backtrack for the 100% completion. The bad "can't pick up weapons of enemies" point is old too, it's probably harder to find games which did this point well than those who didn't. Sure, not really valid excuse, but at least Tomb Raider is not alone with that problem. Kinda problematic that they embrace it even more with her taking them off the enemy in cutscenes, instead of finding them in special places or buying them from a merchant, or maybe find "her" old guns again. In other regards Shadow worked for me better than Rise and the Reboot. I'd have to replay again to precisely pinpoint most, the clearest i remember is how stealth works great, while the Reboot had an really awful aggro mechanic where enemies would know precisely where you are from across massive obstacles in between and hit you on the head with grenades. For me Shadow is definitly the best of the new triology. Maybe it would have been Rise if it weren't for my personal bunch of technical issues including broken achievements, which weren't patched at all (as far as i'm aware, stopped tracking after a year or so). Rise had at least a little less of the overly-unrealistic setup for the arch villain. That I'm personally much in favor of warm looking regions than the cold might also play a role there.
Thanks for the well-worded comment! ^^ This comment took me longer to get to than I'd like but here goes. Also I just love discussing these points about games so my phrases may sound harsh or whatever but I hope they don't come across as rude or anything, I just like talking about this stuff and I am genuinely with no irony glad for you that you enjoyed Shadow. Honestly I hope I would have enjoyed it myself.... :D I believe I mentioned something along the lines of " I know magic has been a thing in Tomb Raider before", and what I tried to get across was that I felt the "realistic gritty survival" reboot was a chance to step back from the magic plots of the old games. It gives more gravitas to things like survival and makes the events more believable and relatable in that context. If the solution is "it's magic because Jesus is real" (which is basically the case in Rise) it needlessly removes weight from of any events that rely on some realism, which is what the reboot trilogy was trying to go for. Be it killing deer to have food to survive or from worrying about cold or of the death of other NPCs. If that happens in a universe where the plot revolves around crazy levels of magic, the "gritty realism" of the reboots fall flat. Things become meaningless when the solution can absolutely be " it's fine because magic ". My point is that if they decide to go with magic they should then have leaned into it completely with the gamedesign focus. Instead what we ended up with is this mishmash of focuses between trying to flirt with realistic survival but failing at that because the world is NOT realistic due to magic. It's the equivalent of having a survival sim in LOTR and Gandalf is just around at all times and could conjure up eagles/food/his deity for you and heal the dead if things go south. Zero gravitas. Don't know what to tell you about the glitches, I had by miles the largest amount of them here of the three reboot games. The first one was the most stable. :D Whether or not "can't pick up weapons" has been a thing in other video games before is fairly meaningless to me. If something has been done poorly or illogically before that is to me not a reason to keep doing it again. If an NES game has an issue, that doesn't mean it's forever okay to have the same issue in future video games. Especially in the last 10+ years games have been rising in appreciation as an artform and their stories and world-contexts have been measured with more scrutiny, especially if the game is indeed trying to tell a compelling, relatable, realistic story that has weight and artistic value as a story in the medium it is in. This means that buzzwords like " ludonarrative dissonance" became a thing where the events and mechanics in the game should make sense in terms of the game world/game story itself. If events don't make sense ( i.e. Lara is trying to survive in this survival themed game but cannot pick up a weapon.... even though she does pick up exactly that kind of a weapon a couple of cutscenes later ) that eats away at the believability and relatability of the art piece that is this game. On top of that FPS games and shooters for the past 2-3 generations of games tend to have it so that if an enemy has a weapon that you can in-game use, you take that weapon or ammo from that weapon. A classic example that springs to mind is Goldeneye on the N64 and basically everything after that. I am having trouble thinking of any games outside of this Tomb Raider trilogy where the mechanic is " kill 25-50 assault rifle enemies until you take one of the assault rifles from their hands". Many games don't let you have guns, or don't let you have an assault rifle perhaps but this scenario is very different from that. And again. The games that do this same mistake do not excuse that mistake. And it's even worse that the illogicality of getting/not getting/losing your weapons only got worse during this trilogy. Again, the first of the three had the least amount of problems with this. I don't disagree with you about the firts TR reboot's aggro mechanics versus how they operate here, but I hate forced stealth sections in games that are not otherwise game-concept wise focused as stealth games. I love Dishonored and Hitman : Blood Money, but I hate it if in an action game I'm forced into a couple of stealth sections and I hate it even more if the reason for forcing me into that section doesn't hold water in the game's own context. So I'm both annoyed AND the game's believability goes in the trashbin because they botched how the weapons are lost and/or how you get/don't get weapons when you don't have them for a bit. I agree with you that the broken achievements in Rise were annoying, at least on Xbox One they didn't patch them, I had to use a physical copy to downpatch the game to get them via glitching out a thing and.... it was an achievement in on itself to get those things. The archvillain point of 3 is.... I don't know. 1 had magic villain, 2 had the baddie organization, 3 had the villain himself be a non-magical dude but his story of rising to the leading role in Trinity was.... it sounded quite non-credible. Don't get me wrong, I'd love it if anyone from any lost native village has a reasonable chance to get a doctorate in the US and reach to be the head honcho of a secret paramilitary organization but I just don't think that's actually the case. On top I can't even put into words how lazy it is that the high council or whatever of Trinity get's helicoptered in and killed off-screen in the span of like 2 minutes at the very end. It smells of a symptom of a story with no coherent plan. With all that said, I'm genuinely glad you enjoyed the game, I just felt that with this reboot trilogy they had something really cool on their hands as a concept and simply didn't stick the landing. And I hope my words didn't come across as a-holey :D
i was so excited for a puzzle game. just like the original tomb raider on ps1, i hated this game. not because it sucked, but because of the check points. i look away for a second. i drown in the first level, and restart. HAVING TO DO THE SAME FUCKING JUMP SHIT AGAIN AND AGAIN AND AGAIN... THE CHECKPOINTS KILLED THE GAME. its not interesting. its not fun, its not hard. it started off awesome, for a split second, and then bam... you'll have no checkpoints, n have to swim in this stupid ass fucking water again, then climb up this other crap again. then one little puzzle you mistake kills you. guess what? the ENTIRE FUCKING TEDIOUS STUPID SHIT AGAIN.
They shouldn't have made this into a series. They should have stopped on the 2013 Tomb Raider: A survivor is born...cos that was more intriguing, emotionally responsive. There was purpose, but the subsequent two sequels were just nonsense, tomb raiding, and this last one was barely sensible. I am just disappointed at the waste of graphics and time. We don't just need graphics we need a captivating story and ohhhb they should quit the usual crash scene at the beginning. It doesn't make sense
I have to say, the collectathon was the worst part of Shadows. There's just so many things wrong with it, from the mindless exploration, constantly having to press survival instincts just to see anything, to all the time-consuming and unfulfilling backtracking. There was just way too many collectables in Shadows - probably twice or 3x as many compared to the past games? To make matters worse, the loot game was bad too. The game gives you all of these weapon models, upgrades, outfit combat skills, etc. and there's so little combat in the game to utilize them. If you're not picking the survival instincts and utility skills in the skill tree, you're just playing the game wrong. And when there is combat - which I want to stress is pretty rare - most of the time you are restricted to using your bow, making the entire loot game enormously pointless.
I agree with most of this. Even if flaws are left in the game (which there are going to be) there should be some attempt made to balance them with the rules of the world it creates. For example. The crawling through small spaces - that seems to be fine for plot points and cut scenes, but you need a knife or a shotgun to get through barriers which have similar holes. What would make more sense is if you had to get something sensible to pass the barriers. For example, if the barrier had poisonous thorns on it and you had to get a protective garment or something to counteract the poison. This could then be referred back to the story in a plot point (maybe a particular poison is holy to the local tribe or something). The shotgun to pass a steel barrier strikes me as a nudge and a wink to games of the past, which is all very good to acknowledge your influences, but it doesnt work because theres nothing behind it. It would be better to have a sensible barrier and say "ok, we're giving a nod to the barriers in metroidvanias, but we're taking them a step further and integrating them into the story". Same with the magic. To put magic in a game that is trying to be realistic is hard. The best way to do it, I think, is to make it ambiguous - yes, things could be magic, but there could be a real world explanation, rather than just going "yay, magic...no, fuck off, its MAGIC!" and leaving it at that. Why not make it a question of belief, which happens in real life anyway, for example? A religious element would work well and thicken the story up. As for the technical...difficulties, shall we say, it always puzzles me when such gaping holes are left (the T posing in Mass Effect Andromeda is another good example of this). The only thing I can think is that it must be because of time and possibly constraints - the pace of game development these days is so silly that basic things get overlooked. I think what REALLY shat the bed as far as development time and concerns about engine constraints goes is the whole saga of Duke Nukem Forever. It took so long and was such a mess that everyone is a tiny bit paranoid about spending too much time on a game in case the engine goes out of date - not that its a conscious thing like "argh, we can't be like Duke Nukem Forever" but that whole debacle brought up an issue regarding time and feature creep, and people can't help but be aware of it. Unfortunately, theres no real way to put the toothpaste back in the tube as far as that goes. The knives? lol - there are only four you can have in the universe and you have to make one of them from a propeller. Thats ham fisted and silly, but if the world supported it it would be acceptable (clearly it doesnt, because how could it). The thing about taking rifles and other weapons only in certain circumstances is the Metal Gear series all over again - it annoyed me that you could never take someones AK or pistol after breaking their neck in that game. Sorry this has been a bit long, but I think thats all I have, lol - either way, I think your criticisms are well founded. :o)
Thanks for commenting , man! ^^ And yeah, metroidvania barriers would be just fine with the kind of adjustments you suggested to make sense. And most of the good metroidvanias I can think of, like Symphony Of The Night or Shadow Complex and such mostly or even fully have barriers that make more sense than the ones here, even though they are of the " 2D action platformer" type of metroidvanias. Magic is indeed problematic, it fits poorly especially to an archeological focus, because it tends to take away the gravitas of the archeology, because the world isn't the one we know because magic and 4 knives. Interestingly enough the second game does have a religious plot focus to it.... but it goes all in and says " okay then THIS is Jesus, THESE are the mongol zombies he created and THIS is the artifact that granted immortality to him. Oh good. I can almost appreciate that level of silly, but again the game should then not be in any other way realistic / archeological and you still fight normal men for 85% of the game which is a missed opportunity. Technical difficulties are a difficult beast, because I have by chance been introduced to a few people who've made games or are making games in the last year and while exact details are shrouded in NDA's and most of the people I know make very small indie games, I've still learned that making big games has almost always ridiculous time constraints coupled sometimes with frankly criminally unhealthy amounts of hours per week ( Such as with Rockstar and RDR 2 ), so things get overlooked or people simply don't have time to fix everything even if they see that there's a problem. So it's a bit of a double edged sword because I have to appreciate and assume that the devs genuinely did all they humanly could and the issue lies with either the publisher or bad management.... but on the other hand if I have bought the game and the core gameplay has serious technical issues.... that's still a problem for me and I can't just give it a pass. The knives and rifles thing is... yeah I literally just groaned in every game of the trilogy that did that. It's so weird because they could have just put a throwaway line in there saying something like " Trinity guns are DNA coded" or something. It would've been hamfisted and silly but it would've at least been an explanation. When it comes to context ANY explanation is worth something. And don't worry, long comments just mean that you thought about the stuff you said, and that makes me happy. All comments and likes and such make me feel that the work I put in my videos is appreciated, and I thank you :)
It is not. A walking simulator filled with bugs, with a nonsensical game design, out-dated level design and trash puzzles (literally all the problems of modern aaa games).
OVERALL, this is basically assassins creed unity... i've only hated 1 other game this much. i've deleted it twice, n gave it one extra chance. but its garbage.
And there are some people that thought Return of the Jedi was better than Empire.😂 all jokes aside to each his own. This game is a wet dream for Graphic whores which is probably a lot of why you liked this game but for most, this game was boring as fuck and inferior to its predecessor. They even downgraded the graphics for the main protagonist but that’s not even my problem with the game. They wrote themselves into a corner and didn’t really know where to take the story. It’s like they didn’t really have a end game plan for the trilogy when the first reboot TR was conceived which is why we got the ending we have. Overall a very forgettable game and a trilogy that deteriorated and dropped review scores with each sequel. Pretty much says all that needs to be said.
just a lame video shadow of the tomb raider is the best of the trilogy REASON: shadow of the tomb raider have better graphics, gameplay , stealth kill , outfits people are calling it bad which is not acceptable what's wrong with people they are saying that they like past two games but not this one because this game is similar to the past two games .......... the truth is they also don't like the past two games because if they do then they should like this one
The worst part of the story was that at the beginning of the game, Lara was super obsessive and was responsible for the deaths of thousands as a result of initial actions, and never suffers any consequences for it. By the end, we're led to believe that the real point of the story was to let go of her parents, all the while, we never see Lara become the Tomb Raider. She never wields dual pistols. She never becomes the Tomb Raider from Legend/Anniversary at all. In fact, outside of these plot problems, she is basically the same character we saw in Rise. I thought the whole point of this trilogy was to take us on a journey to Tomb Raider: Legend. This is a huge architecture problem, and makes the trilogy very unsatisfying.
As an aside, Rise had a much better story by miles and miles. They changed writers, and it shows.
Honestly i never understood why this Trilogy was called Tomb Raider. In the first game she literally confirms she hates Tombs. I can understand the opinion the old Lara was perhaps made to sexy and unrealistic. But how does this Lara compare in any way to her. Did she become a Nun or something. The only reference we got in this trilogy to the old Lara is her name and a scene where she is seen holding dual pistols. That's it. Ohw right and the neverending daddy issues. Almost forgot those. Crystal Dynamic seems to have a really hard time letting things go. At least the Lara from the first 4 games was badass. Did not take crap from no one and showed she was her own woman. The daddy thing worked for Legend untill Underworld. But please enough is enough. This Lara does not even have half the boobs the old one had but yet she can never walk with her shoulder straight. Replaced by a tiresome weight of sorrow even she can't carry anymore. The first game was promising. But i can't even bring myself to play Rise anymore. Give us Tombs,A badass Lara Croft and a new Plot. God knows she needs it.
Fantastic comment. Very well put; I agree with everything.
worst thing about this whole reboot is that Tomb Raider fans are fighting each other in 3 directions. with a slight odd group of people that likes all of them. because they literally just made Tomb Raider into something completely different like if Mario suddenly started saying i hate muchrooms and now im gonna fuck shit up im gonna kill 1000 bowsers and fuck Princess Peach because thats the new me. then starts commensing operation with Sergeant Luigi also btw what is up with this stupid cap i am wearing i always hated red... thats what Tomb Raider Reboot did to Tomb Raider fans. Thanks square enix and crystal dynamics... thx a lot.
I liked the old ones.this Lara is different.she not compared the old one.old Lara has no helped her what she does.
On one hand, I feel bad for those who played the new games and never touched the actual Tomb Raider games, those made in the 90s. On the other hand, I'm glad these shady developers are being ridiculized and rejected by the same new audience they have tried to chase by stripping the franchise of everything that made it great in the first place.
Your review is the best
These game developers for this game absolutely suck ballz. Like it's one thing to have a game that's challenging and fun like Uncharted. It's another thing when every fkin two steps you're falling off some got damn cliff, or have to put 20 arrows into a freaking jaguar before it fks off and dies. These stupid developers must of never touched a gun before in their lives. Bunch of soy neck beards through out all gaming companys. A bullet will put a person down even if they're wearing a vest. It'll break ribs, However it seems you have to always put a quarter of a clip into an NPC at any given time for them to finally go down.
In Shadow of the tomb raider they give Lara a shot gun, and she's shooting slugz at those inbred things in the tomb. Do you know what one blast of a slug would do to flesh and bones? Instead we're left with all these inbreds or monsters still coming after you even though you put 3 slugz in them. It's not fun. I honestly don't know where they get these developers from. Like two scratches will make the screen turn black and white like Lara is in critical condition, but one slug wont put a whole through one of those monsters' chest. It's so stupid. This game starts out fun, but then you realize from the start you're just going to keep dying and dying and dying and dying and dying AND FKING DYING AND DYING SOME FKING MORE. Maybe if you play the game a few dozen times you'll finally have it memorized, but whatever. you're right these developers fking suck, and so does who ever ok'd this b.s.
and Lara lied to the queen about taking the box for herself when it is quite evident she does by
seeing it displayed on the desk in her office in the post-end credit scene.
4:19 Wow.. That actually looks even dumber than it sounds :DDD
I also just love that moment when there's like half a second where the barrier disappears completely before it tumbles down : D I think it's a glitch that always happens if you have the "Detective Vision" on.
Yeah I feel like tomb raider 2013 and rise beat this game bc square enix actually put a little effort to this game shadow however was a little fun in the beginning but then it feels like the game got lazy and just didn't care I wish this game was better.
Man, the jump at 10:33 ... Oh my god I almost gave up the game. I tried it like at least 100 time, no exaggeration. (PS I am a hardcore TR fan, playing on some pretty awesome PC.) I even had a thought of finding a savegame after this point since there was no progress for me. Lucky enough I somehow made it. It was weird. Nice video btw
I havent had any issues with jumps 😂
@@sketchtheparadigmyork1217 the comment was made when there weren't patches yet for these issues.
At first I thought a text-to-speech said the, "Hello." Hahaha
Just finished it, and damn, even compared to TR2013 and Rise, this game is rough. Some of this is definitely due to elements born in TR2013 persisting with no logical change (starting with no skills, no equipment, etc), while the rest is just poor gameplay and story decisions, resulting in the game feeing extremely padded out
They focused alot on collectsbles. Over board and it feels like walking and jumping simulator. Idk i still like the game csuse its tomb raider.
They tried to copy Uncharted and failed big time.
I actually never played Uncharted because I don't own a PS3 or 4 :D The issue isn't even to me as such whether or not they tried to copy Uncharted, it's more that the series churned out three games so identical in their mechanics and lack of evolution that somehow Rise and Shadow are arguably slightly worse than the first Reboot Tomb Raider. They repeat the same mistakes and sometimes even make the same mistakes bigger.
I would hope not, Uncharted 4 is even worse
@@jluck1399I played them all.i hoped they won't make no more uncharted games.
@@jluck13991 to 3 was good.4th one know he mentioned he's brother lol to he's wife.
I didn't like how finding relics or reading monoliths or the murals would stop the game into a menu in order to hear the dialogue. I'd rather have her pick it up or interact with it and continue moving and have the information play out and later have the option in the menu to take a closer look. Also, all the found texts and journals were just read in laras voice would have been nice hearing it in the writer's own voice. Its the same thing with these journals the game pauses and you gotta sit for about 2 min to hear what it says, so a lot of people are just skipping over it. Just keep the game moving and have it play. Don't keep us out of the Tomb Raiding Action!
She’d constantly get cut off, since there’s dialogue as you traverse the environments most of the time
Love the game a lot but... It really feels very stupid...
Isn't the whole magic-thing pretty standard for Tomb Raider? Basically every Tomb Raider i remember had this magical aspect, often you'd have to fight against endbosses who were (partially) transformed to something not-human and the like. Starting with the original Tomb Raider which featured an artifact that created Mutants and the endboss grows wings for the last fight.
Interestingly I actually had fairly few technical issues with Shadow, less than Rise. A few visual glitches and weird jumps when jumping in the "wrong" direction, but overall pretty fine.
The progression-based obstacles didn't bother me too much personally, but fair criticism, it'd be better to either tie them to something fitting or even get rid of it, it's not really a big upside to need to backtrack for the 100% completion.
The bad "can't pick up weapons of enemies" point is old too, it's probably harder to find games which did this point well than those who didn't. Sure, not really valid excuse, but at least Tomb Raider is not alone with that problem. Kinda problematic that they embrace it even more with her taking them off the enemy in cutscenes, instead of finding them in special places or buying them from a merchant, or maybe find "her" old guns again.
In other regards Shadow worked for me better than Rise and the Reboot. I'd have to replay again to precisely pinpoint most, the clearest i remember is how stealth works great, while the Reboot had an really awful aggro mechanic where enemies would know precisely where you are from across massive obstacles in between and hit you on the head with grenades.
For me Shadow is definitly the best of the new triology. Maybe it would have been Rise if it weren't for my personal bunch of technical issues including broken achievements, which weren't patched at all (as far as i'm aware, stopped tracking after a year or so). Rise had at least a little less of the overly-unrealistic setup for the arch villain. That I'm personally much in favor of warm looking regions than the cold might also play a role there.
Thanks for the well-worded comment! ^^ This comment took me longer to get to than I'd like but here goes. Also I just love discussing these points about games so my phrases may sound harsh or whatever but I hope they don't come across as rude or anything, I just like talking about this stuff and I am genuinely with no irony glad for you that you enjoyed Shadow. Honestly I hope I would have enjoyed it myself.... :D
I believe I mentioned something along the lines of " I know magic has been a thing in Tomb Raider before", and what I tried to get across was that I felt the "realistic gritty survival" reboot was a chance to step back from the magic plots of the old games. It gives more gravitas to things like survival and makes the events more believable and relatable in that context. If the solution is "it's magic because Jesus is real" (which is basically the case in Rise) it needlessly removes weight from of any events that rely on some realism, which is what the reboot trilogy was trying to go for. Be it killing deer to have food to survive or from worrying about cold or of the death of other NPCs. If that happens in a universe where the plot revolves around crazy levels of magic, the "gritty realism" of the reboots fall flat. Things become meaningless when the solution can absolutely be " it's fine because magic ". My point is that if they decide to go with magic they should then have leaned into it completely with the gamedesign focus. Instead what we ended up with is this mishmash of focuses between trying to flirt with realistic survival but failing at that because the world is NOT realistic due to magic. It's the equivalent of having a survival sim in LOTR and Gandalf is just around at all times and could conjure up eagles/food/his deity for you and heal the dead if things go south. Zero gravitas.
Don't know what to tell you about the glitches, I had by miles the largest amount of them here of the three reboot games. The first one was the most stable. :D
Whether or not "can't pick up weapons" has been a thing in other video games before is fairly meaningless to me. If something has been done poorly or illogically before that is to me not a reason to keep doing it again. If an NES game has an issue, that doesn't mean it's forever okay to have the same issue in future video games. Especially in the last 10+ years games have been rising in appreciation as an artform and their stories and world-contexts have been measured with more scrutiny, especially if the game is indeed trying to tell a compelling, relatable, realistic story that has weight and artistic value as a story in the medium it is in. This means that buzzwords like " ludonarrative dissonance" became a thing where the events and mechanics in the game should make sense in terms of the game world/game story itself. If events don't make sense ( i.e. Lara is trying to survive in this survival themed game but cannot pick up a weapon.... even though she does pick up exactly that kind of a weapon a couple of cutscenes later ) that eats away at the believability and relatability of the art piece that is this game. On top of that FPS games and shooters for the past 2-3 generations of games tend to have it so that if an enemy has a weapon that you can in-game use, you take that weapon or ammo from that weapon. A classic example that springs to mind is Goldeneye on the N64 and basically everything after that. I am having trouble thinking of any games outside of this Tomb Raider trilogy where the mechanic is " kill 25-50 assault rifle enemies until you take one of the assault rifles from their hands". Many games don't let you have guns, or don't let you have an assault rifle perhaps but this scenario is very different from that. And again. The games that do this same mistake do not excuse that mistake. And it's even worse that the illogicality of getting/not getting/losing your weapons only got worse during this trilogy. Again, the first of the three had the least amount of problems with this.
I don't disagree with you about the firts TR reboot's aggro mechanics versus how they operate here, but I hate forced stealth sections in games that are not otherwise game-concept wise focused as stealth games. I love Dishonored and Hitman : Blood Money, but I hate it if in an action game I'm forced into a couple of stealth sections and I hate it even more if the reason for forcing me into that section doesn't hold water in the game's own context. So I'm both annoyed AND the game's believability goes in the trashbin because they botched how the weapons are lost and/or how you get/don't get weapons when you don't have them for a bit.
I agree with you that the broken achievements in Rise were annoying, at least on Xbox One they didn't patch them, I had to use a physical copy to downpatch the game to get them via glitching out a thing and.... it was an achievement in on itself to get those things. The archvillain point of 3 is.... I don't know. 1 had magic villain, 2 had the baddie organization, 3 had the villain himself be a non-magical dude but his story of rising to the leading role in Trinity was.... it sounded quite non-credible. Don't get me wrong, I'd love it if anyone from any lost native village has a reasonable chance to get a doctorate in the US and reach to be the head honcho of a secret paramilitary organization but I just don't think that's actually the case. On top I can't even put into words how lazy it is that the high council or whatever of Trinity get's helicoptered in and killed off-screen in the span of like 2 minutes at the very end. It smells of a symptom of a story with no coherent plan.
With all that said, I'm genuinely glad you enjoyed the game, I just felt that with this reboot trilogy they had something really cool on their hands as a concept and simply didn't stick the landing. And I hope my words didn't come across as a-holey :D
This is no different to raider of the lost ark film franchise with mystical magic relics within the storyline
i was so excited for a puzzle game. just like the original tomb raider on ps1, i hated this game. not because it sucked, but because of the check points. i look away for a second. i drown in the first level, and restart. HAVING TO DO THE SAME FUCKING JUMP SHIT AGAIN AND AGAIN AND AGAIN... THE CHECKPOINTS KILLED THE GAME. its not interesting. its not fun, its not hard. it started off awesome, for a split second, and then bam... you'll have no checkpoints, n have to swim in this stupid ass fucking water again, then climb up this other crap again. then one little puzzle you mistake kills you. guess what? the ENTIRE FUCKING TEDIOUS STUPID SHIT AGAIN.
They shouldn't have made this into a series. They should have stopped on the 2013 Tomb Raider: A survivor is born...cos that was more intriguing, emotionally responsive.
There was purpose, but the subsequent two sequels were just nonsense, tomb raiding, and this last one was barely sensible.
I am just disappointed at the waste of graphics and time.
We don't just need graphics we need a captivating story and ohhhb they should quit the usual crash scene at the beginning. It doesn't make sense
Liked and subbed. Thank you.
I like this game, but these are all valid complaints and a nice video.
I have to say, the collectathon was the worst part of Shadows. There's just so many things wrong with it, from the mindless exploration, constantly having to press survival instincts just to see anything, to all the time-consuming and unfulfilling backtracking. There was just way too many collectables in Shadows - probably twice or 3x as many compared to the past games?
To make matters worse, the loot game was bad too. The game gives you all of these weapon models, upgrades, outfit combat skills, etc. and there's so little combat in the game to utilize them. If you're not picking the survival instincts and utility skills in the skill tree, you're just playing the game wrong. And when there is combat - which I want to stress is pretty rare - most of the time you are restricted to using your bow, making the entire loot game enormously pointless.
I agree with most of this. Even if flaws are left in the game (which there are going to be) there should be some attempt made to balance them with the rules of the world it creates. For example. The crawling through small spaces - that seems to be fine for plot points and cut scenes, but you need a knife or a shotgun to get through barriers which have similar holes. What would make more sense is if you had to get something sensible to pass the barriers. For example, if the barrier had poisonous thorns on it and you had to get a protective garment or something to counteract the poison. This could then be referred back to the story in a plot point (maybe a particular poison is holy to the local tribe or something). The shotgun to pass a steel barrier strikes me as a nudge and a wink to games of the past, which is all very good to acknowledge your influences, but it doesnt work because theres nothing behind it. It would be better to have a sensible barrier and say "ok, we're giving a nod to the barriers in metroidvanias, but we're taking them a step further and integrating them into the story".
Same with the magic. To put magic in a game that is trying to be realistic is hard. The best way to do it, I think, is to make it ambiguous - yes, things could be magic, but there could be a real world explanation, rather than just going "yay, magic...no, fuck off, its MAGIC!" and leaving it at that. Why not make it a question of belief, which happens in real life anyway, for example? A religious element would work well and thicken the story up.
As for the technical...difficulties, shall we say, it always puzzles me when such gaping holes are left (the T posing in Mass Effect Andromeda is another good example of this). The only thing I can think is that it must be because of time and possibly constraints - the pace of game development these days is so silly that basic things get overlooked. I think what REALLY shat the bed as far as development time and concerns about engine constraints goes is the whole saga of Duke Nukem Forever. It took so long and was such a mess that everyone is a tiny bit paranoid about spending too much time on a game in case the engine goes out of date - not that its a conscious thing like "argh, we can't be like Duke Nukem Forever" but that whole debacle brought up an issue regarding time and feature creep, and people can't help but be aware of it. Unfortunately, theres no real way to put the toothpaste back in the tube as far as that goes.
The knives? lol - there are only four you can have in the universe and you have to make one of them from a propeller. Thats ham fisted and silly, but if the world supported it it would be acceptable (clearly it doesnt, because how could it). The thing about taking rifles and other weapons only in certain circumstances is the Metal Gear series all over again - it annoyed me that you could never take someones AK or pistol after breaking their neck in that game. Sorry this has been a bit long, but I think thats all I have, lol - either way, I think your criticisms are well founded. :o)
Thanks for commenting , man! ^^
And yeah, metroidvania barriers would be just fine with the kind of adjustments you suggested to make sense. And most of the good metroidvanias I can think of, like Symphony Of The Night or Shadow Complex and such mostly or even fully have barriers that make more sense than the ones here, even though they are of the " 2D action platformer" type of metroidvanias.
Magic is indeed problematic, it fits poorly especially to an archeological focus, because it tends to take away the gravitas of the archeology, because the world isn't the one we know because magic and 4 knives. Interestingly enough the second game does have a religious plot focus to it.... but it goes all in and says " okay then THIS is Jesus, THESE are the mongol zombies he created and THIS is the artifact that granted immortality to him. Oh good. I can almost appreciate that level of silly, but again the game should then not be in any other way realistic / archeological and you still fight normal men for 85% of the game which is a missed opportunity.
Technical difficulties are a difficult beast, because I have by chance been introduced to a few people who've made games or are making games in the last year and while exact details are shrouded in NDA's and most of the people I know make very small indie games, I've still learned that making big games has almost always ridiculous time constraints coupled sometimes with frankly criminally unhealthy amounts of hours per week ( Such as with Rockstar and RDR 2 ), so things get overlooked or people simply don't have time to fix everything even if they see that there's a problem. So it's a bit of a double edged sword because I have to appreciate and assume that the devs genuinely did all they humanly could and the issue lies with either the publisher or bad management.... but on the other hand if I have bought the game and the core gameplay has serious technical issues.... that's still a problem for me and I can't just give it a pass.
The knives and rifles thing is... yeah I literally just groaned in every game of the trilogy that did that. It's so weird because they could have just put a throwaway line in there saying something like " Trinity guns are DNA coded" or something. It would've been hamfisted and silly but it would've at least been an explanation. When it comes to context ANY explanation is worth something. And don't worry, long comments just mean that you thought about the stuff you said, and that makes me happy. All comments and likes and such make me feel that the work I put in my videos is appreciated, and I thank you :)
@@Kriostyx Youre welcome - good to see you back. :o)
The game is literally fine, everyone just jumped on this bandwagon because it had to follow one of the best tomb raider games in the series.
What? This game sucks. It's slightly better than Angel of Darkness to me, that's it.
It is not.
A walking simulator filled with bugs, with a nonsensical game design, out-dated level design and trash puzzles (literally all the problems of modern aaa games).
OVERALL, this is basically assassins creed unity... i've only hated 1 other game this much. i've deleted it twice, n gave it one extra chance. but its garbage.
I don't know the problem of the people with this game... I loved this game! For me it's the best of reboot trilogy !
And there are some people that thought Return of the Jedi was better than Empire.😂 all jokes aside to each his own. This game is a wet dream for Graphic whores which is probably a lot of why you liked this game but for most, this game was boring as fuck and inferior to its predecessor. They even downgraded the graphics for the main protagonist but that’s not even my problem with the game. They wrote themselves into a corner and didn’t really know where to take the story. It’s like they didn’t really have a end game plan for the trilogy when the first reboot TR was conceived which is why we got the ending we have. Overall a very forgettable game and a trilogy that deteriorated and dropped review scores with each sequel. Pretty much says all that needs to be said.
@@Loophole23742 Shadow > Rise
It’s only a game. How can people get uptight and hyper - critical over a tongue in cheek story line. Just enjoy the experience.
just a lame video shadow of the tomb raider is the best of the trilogy
REASON: shadow of the tomb raider have better graphics, gameplay , stealth kill , outfits
people are calling it bad which is not acceptable
what's wrong with people they are saying that they like past two games but not this one because this game is similar to the past two games .......... the truth is they also don't like the past two games because if they do then they should like this one