Shadow of the Tomb Raider (2018)

Shadow of the Tomb Raider (2018), developed by Eidos Montreal, published by Square Enix

The final act of the modern reboot of Tomb Raider takes place in an apocalyptic venue. Lara and Jonah have tracked down Trinity to Mexico, from where Lara finds an ancient dagger surrounded by warnings of apocalypse if the dagger is taken. She ignores the warnings, and as she takes the dagger, a chain of apocalyptic events begins, culminating in a total eclipse during which the world will be reborn. 

Lara and Jonah continue chasing Trinity and end up in Paititi, a hidden city in the Peruvian jungle. This is the stage for the final showdown, where Trinity is trying to use the apocalypse to create the world into their own image, while the rebels of Paititi are trying to leave it as it should be. Lara joins forces with the rebels, pained by the knowledge that the apocalypse started because of her actions.

As in the previous games, Lara has to find her way through areas filled with enemies and environmental blocks. She has her mountain pick, rope arrow, foot spikes, and the like to help her get over the hardest of obstacles. Then there's the XP gained from finding secrets, solving missions, and so on that can be used to upgrade her abilities, like making spotting loot easier or helping her hold her breath longer underwater.

During the game, she'll find a lot of weapons that can be upgraded a bit by using all kinds of loot she finds. But here, tinkering with guns is more of a wasted effort if you have the DLC packs, why wouldn't you have them as they can be bought with the complete edition? You'll likely notice that those guns are automatically way better than anything you find in the game, making using them a no-brainer.

There are all kinds of suits and armour for Lara to wear, and this time around, a couple of missions require her to dress up as an enemy to help her infiltrate locations. Of course, all these missions tend to end up in a regular blood bath, as is the norm in this reboot series, but it's at least something a bit different. This mechanic should have been utilized more in the game, as it could have made it a tad more interesting.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider is an okay ending for the story that got its beginning from the first entry of the reboot. Now that Trinity has been taken care of, Lara is in a place where she can leave the pain of her family behind her and begin looking at the world and its mysteries as a way of protecting them, not just blindly revealing them for personal gain.

  

You can mostly ignore all the extra padding, the hunting, the weapons and armour modifications, and the like. If you want, you can try to find all the secrets hidden in the rather lovely environments, but nothing is particularly compelling you to do so. That is, perhaps, a testament to how mundane digging around in these overly massive games has become, when there's no particular glee in trying to dig up every secret there is and it might be better for the future to reassess if all the extra layers of complexity are really needed, when a lot of it, like weapons mods and hunting in this case, feel like something you can completely ignore. Perhaps less is more.

 But anyway, Shadow of the Tomb Raider is a perfectly serviceable game. The gameplay is fun, and the story is, if not great, at least decent. If you liked the action and the gameplay of the two previous titles, it's safe to assume you'll get a kick out of this one too.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider can be bought on Steam. Maybe from other stores as well for PC.