I had heard some grumblings on the internet that the writers made a mess of Shadow of the Tomb Raider making Lara too whiny. After finishing the game I can’t say that I agree. If I had one issue with the writing it would have been that they had an opportunity to go for a more sadistic Lara at one point and didn’t take it. I can understand why they didn’t as many would feel it isn’t in the characters nature but it seemed like a missed opportunity and something I would have enjoyed to see explored. If you have played the previous Tomb Raider games in this reboot franchise then you know what to expect. The puzzles are overall pretty decent, some are a tad annoying but nothing too bad. Two bits I will single out on that front is there is a puzzle involving mirrors that I felt had too much backtracking. There is another puzzle to progress in the tomb of the Monkey Gods where the save points are much farther apart than normal which made it more annoying than it had to be. The voice acting is fantastic as usual. The story was interesting but a little poorly explained at points. How exactly does what Lara do cause tidal waves and earthquakes ? Even a non scientific supernatural answer would have sufficed but none came. Also near the end when a “God needs to be sacrificed” the God in question doesn’t actually die so what do they mean by sacrifice ? Overall though the story was enjoyable as were many of the characters. The franchise has done a good job having interesting villains. The graphics as usual were very good. Fabrics getting wet had great detail; lighting was fantastic; and face shadows and hair details were all great. Dead enemies looked poor as did most of the ground detail though. I also disliked the piranha’s which can attack you underwater. Unlike the eels where you have a chance to defeat them the piranha’s are a one hit kill enemy that require a bit of stealth to bypass which I don’t enjoy. The combat was fun; easy to get into and had loads of options for play styles. I liked the addition of covering Lara with mud to sneak and hide in bushes and walls waiting to knife enemies.
I played Shadow of the Tomb Raider on Linux. It crashed on me twice during my play through. Once was on exit but the other was during game play. The game did have an issue where the audio would crackle on me or have what sounded like static but this only happened a couple times total. The game uses an auto save process of checkpoints. There is a manual save option but it never seemed to save my exact location and I would start from my most recent checkpoint anyway. Alt-Tab didn’t work for me. There are thirteen different graphics options to go with a toggle for ambient occlusion and three different settings for AA. You can change the difficulty at any time during game play. I also had an issue where a lever I needed to use wouldn’t give me the option to use it until I quit and reloaded my save. Overall the game ran really well. The few times where the game would drop in frame rate never lasted very long and my usual FPS was above 80 FPS. The game supported my 144 hz.
Disk Space Used: 36.2GB
Game Version Played: 1.0.3
Settings Used: Everything at highest; depth of field off; @1080P
GPU Usage: 5-99 %
VRAM Used: 3559-6165 MB
CPU Usage: 12-80 %
RAM Usage: 4.9-6.7 GB
Frame Rate: 34-144 FPS
Despite some technical issues the game ran well overall and was fun to play. If you enjoyed previous Tomb Raider games of late then you’ll probably enjoy this one as well. The game play hasn’t changed much and that is fine as it is a good formula. I finished the campaign on “One With the Jungle” difficulty in 24 hours and 30 minutes. The exact completion rate was 77.23% so I did a fair bit of side quests as well. I paid $42.04 CAD for the game and feel it was worth the price.
My Score: 8/10
My System:
AMD Ryzen 5 2600X | 16GB DDR4-3000 CL15 | MSI RX 5700 XT Gaming X 8GB | Mesa 20.1.6 | Samsung 970 Evo Plus 500GB | Manjaro 20.1 | Mate 1.24.1 | Kernel 5.8.3-2-MANJARO | AOC G2460P @1920*1080 144hz