A really satisfying one to 100%. The tombs are the highlight again clever, challenging, and fun to figure out. Exploration feels great, and the jungle setting adds a cool atmosphere the whole way through. Some collectibles take patience, but overall it’s a rewarding completion that feels properly earned. 🏆🌿

I’ve played every Tomb Raider game, and honestly? This one is hands down my favourite so far. The story pacing is spot on. It never drags, never rushes, and actually lets you enjoy the ride.

I love being able to freely explore and stumble across all kinds of goodies. Hidden tombs, relics, some challenging puzzles, treasures, basically catnip for completionists.

The gear and skill system is great too, earning skill points via XP and some abilities are earned by completing Tomb Challenges. Upgrading Lara actually feels meaningful.

One of my favourite touches is how Lara slowly understands ancient languages as you find more relics, unlocking deeper bits of history along the way. It makes exploration feel rewarding, not just pointless grind for collectables and hunting for the sake of it.

On top of that, you can find journals and other bits scattered around that expand the story even more, which I really appreciated.

Performance wise, the game runs extremely well. I had only about three crashes in 112 hours of playtime, which is pretty impressive. I’m currently 97% complete and still hunting down those last few hidden goodies.

Overall? A very solid 9.0/10 for me.

The masochist plays another modern Tomb Raider game.

I actually liked this one a lot at for a bit. I easily enjoyed this one more than the second entry, but for me I find this franchise stays so bland despite any changes.

To get some positives out of the ways, I finally wised up and played at a difficulty above normal. I played at One With the Jungle and it is such a major blessing to have Lara shut up during puzzles. Anything at that difficulty and above, she doesn't give constant feedback and hints during puzzles. Tombs are so much better in this game and for a while, I was having a lot of fun, you know... raiding tombs. The puzzles are decent and the environments are personally much more interesting than the previous two entries. On top of that, for the first leg of the game there is more sporadic combat which I find to be one of the weakest parts of the franchise. As a final sort of positive, I found the story less insufferable than Rise. The writing is still awful and I truly could not care less about what was happening, but I felt I was more easily able to set it aside and adventure than the previous entry.

Alright, onto the negatives. The towns were insufferable. There is only a few of them, but the tedium truly knows no end of having to talk to these npcs, run back and forth looking for relics and knickknacks, and trying to complete challenges. There comes a point in each of these games where my fun factor totally drains away and I desperately wish the game was over. For a good while, I was putting in substantial effort to find every collectible, enjoy the set pieces and environments, and crawl my way through every nook and cranny, but the gameplay is so lackluster that the entertainment cannot last the run time. It's all so banal and by the books. The respite of less combat doesn't last forever either as this game once again totally forgoes any positives it has in terms of exploration and puzzles to once again end in a action slop fest of terrible gunplay.

I wouldn't go so far as to say there is a nugget of gold buried under this game, but there is something just barely enjoyable enough that I wanted to play it despite being totally burnt out after Rise. There is the thinnest layer of fun and a spark of hope present that maybe, just maybe, this game will be kind of okay. Shadow of the Tomb Raider is a depressing reminder of the generic, safe, corporatization of modern gaming. Weak story, weak combat, weak gameplay loop, and yet weak minded fools like me play it anyways. Maybe the real Tomb Raider was the emptiness left along the way.