Angel of Darkness - Alex C, Yasmin K (From the 'Tomb Raider - Angel of Darkness' soundtrack)
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If every piece of The Ship of Theseus is replaced, is it the same ship? If every piece of The Ship of Theseus is replaced with a small monkey or perhaps a dog, is it the same ship? No, it's not. So when every part of the original Tomb Raider games are taken away and replaced with entirely different parts, why is it still called Tomb Raider? Crystal Dynamic's Survivor trilogy has almost nothing in common with its predeccessors outside of the loose premise, so why does it maintain the name? for MONEY!! The only reason these 3 games exist is to squeeze as much profit out of the extremely tired Tomb Raider IP. This (Shadow of the Tomb Raider) is the third installment in the trilogy and it's profit-driven existence is at its worst.
You can tell nobody gave a fuck about making this game. It's a cacophony of unoriginal ideas that are only in here to make sure there was actually a game to play. "So the enemies are uh... mercenaries? Fuck we already did that... ok but these ones have masks on where one half is red, one half is black!!" Every single piece of this game is like this. Reheated concepts from the other TEN games in the series with a slight alteration made to make sure it kind of feels like a new thing and they put at least a tiny bit of effort in. The climbing follows the same philosophy. It's boring as fuck like the other two but now you can uh... swing on a rope!! It's so poorly implemented and janky that there's an intrusive popup reminding you that it's in the game whenever you need to do it.
I don't have a tonne to say about SoTR nor do i really want to. I aired most of my grievances about Crystal Dynamic's modern Tomb Raider games on my review for the 2013 reboot. SoTR came out 5 years later, but still has 90% of the problems present in the 2013 release. Vapid, boring crafting systems and skill trees that do nothing to heighten the experience and can be ignored entirely. Side quests with thrilling objectives like 'Go and press X on 5 different NPCs. They are marked on your map. Also they are all in the same town'. Literally everything is padding, it's a game that struggles to justify it's own existence.
One thing that is different compared to the 2013 game is that the combat is somehow worse? You can no longer throw sand in enemies faces. This is a big downside, because that was the only fun thing about that game. Now you just shoot everyone with guns that feel like shit and a bow that feels like shit. You're heavily encouraged to engage with the stealth systems by various mechanics. One lets you cover yourself in mud to camoflage better, another lets you hide up against walls covered in foliage. These sound pretty cool, but actually using them is so fucking boring!! The enemies in most areas are in no way set up so you can stealthily take them out, and most of my attempts to play stealthily ended after I'd killed like 2 guys.
There is also a narrative in here I guess, but it's so dull and repetitive that I'd pretty much tuned it out entirely by the second act. This may come as a shock, but you're trying to get to an ancient artefact while a bunch of other guys try to do the same thing!! One thing I really dislike about the games in this trilogy is how they all take place in one location the entire time. Tomb Raider is about variation!! I want to be riding a boat in The Amazon Jungle and then sneaking around on rooftops in London an hour later. SOtR is set in Peru and the environments get tired fast. It makes this half-assed attempt to respect the peruvian cultures but still features extensive sequences where Lara is massacring the local populations with a shotgun. She also wears this native outfit for like half the game and looks like this. take that shit off girl!! There's also massive white saviour energy here, with the leader of a local village sacrificing herself to save Lara, and then Lara takes her place in the big ritual at the end. The only other thing I remember about the lore is that I picked up and read ONE (1) lore document and it was about an evil rapist gorilla that lives in the woods? what the fuck?
SOtR is as bland as it gets. Its gruel in video game form. It's random mechanics deemed to be Triple-A acceptable thrown together into one incoherent mass. Nobody who has played this remembers a single thing about it, and I'm happy I never have to touch another Crystal Dynamics Tomb Raider title ever again (until they announce the new one at the game awards on Thursday). It truly has nothing in common with CORE design's original games; anything interesting has been gutted and replaced with the most frictionless, consumer-friendly, boring content you could possibly concieve of. Everything has been discussed, playtested and redesigned to ensure that even a 14-month-old baby could probably play it to the end. They probably wouldnt even like it if they did.
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