Shadow of the tomb raider, 2
Mar. 25th, 2026 03:31 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
requiems100% completion! I have scoured the map for collectibles and had a lovely week inside of ruins and have been jumpscared a few times (but not too badly) and got frustrated during combat sequences a few times (if they discover a body the npc's AI just fucking BEELINES for you even if you're hidden) and had a fair few ???? moments during climbing exploration because it wasn't immediately obvious... sometimes jumps do not look jumpable at first glance, the grappling mechanic fails for no discernible reason except Lara is angled oddly, or she won't navigate complex terrain all that well...
The DLC unfortunately returns to the format that I remember Rise using for its tombs, in that they're all designed around timed puzzles so you can run them quickly to get a higher score and then trophies. I sincerely do not care for timed puzzles that require me to double back half a dozen times because I missed activating something by a fraction of a second. I want to explore it's about the aesthetic and vibes. I want to take my time solving a puzzle myself, but not in a repetitive way. I was perhaps two thirds of the way through the first DLC tomb and so frustrated and having so little fun that I had reached the point of "I don't care I just want it to be over" and used a walkthrough to get out. I am hesitant to do any more of them frankly, but trophies.
I was thinking about maybe doing a Deadly Obsession run in NG+, which is the hardest difficulty of the game with no checkpoints and reduced campfires, which can be done reasonably quickly in NG+ if you get all the gear you need and max out your resources before you start the file. The final boss arena changed my mind on this entirely because I can foresee losing hours of my life to running this sequence.
The problem is. This game isn't great with full combat no stealth opportunity segments. It's not built like that. Even the sequence you are forced to stealth in, when you lose all your gear, can quickly go south with the AI being so keen to beeline towards where you've concealed yourself to give you the opportunity to do an assassination takedown, only there's usually three of the guy's buddies watching this happen. During the oil fields I ended up giving on stealth and just hack and slashing through a couple of encounters, as there's one occasion the enemies have infrared goggles and you can't do anything about it to avoid being caught so you feel extra rushed. But I feel like, watching a walkthrough could make that doable, if you follow the steps around the arena and make full use of everything.
For pure combat where you don't get the option to stealth, there's four sequences for it. The first is where you can one shot the enemies coming in in waves, it's endurance for quantity, mainly, and to teach you how to use your shotgun you just got. After that you get smaller waves every time you successfully complete a puzzle, and the arena's are nice and open and you can jump into water to reset distance if necessary, as their AI largely is set to just run at you as wolves do. The second sequence is a badass moment, where Lara Is Pissed And She Is The Monster, she goes completely feral because deputy bad guy claims he has killed her best friend (and hasn't actually), and she rises out of the water with her rifle and wastes them. She even gets to have her one "fuck" line in the game during this scene. It felt very difficult to lose this fight - a refinery is exploding around you, and stuff is going on in the background outside the arena to aid you. The third sequence has similar background stuff to help you out and you get a token amount of cover. The entire final sequence to the last boss is the fourth, all the way to deputy bad guy's defeat, but you have endless allies spawning during this to make it easier for you.
These are, in a way, all set pieces? The last boss is not that. Pre fight, you have to destroy some idols, and each time you do it breaks the trance it has on his cronies so you fight 1-3 of them, simple enough. Once the fight starts he has five phases, he gets a shield around him and you simply run up and stab it, and after this summons two ads. His fourth phase, he throws Lara into the center of the arena and summons his ads as usual, but it's quite possible you won't have time to move before he lunges at you which knocks you to the floor and lets the ads kill you for free. This happened so many times. These ads require at least 3-4 arrows each, 2-3 shotgun pellets, and you don't have time to take your time with the boss running at you. In retrospect I probably should have used the fear arrows on them so they would take each other out but Man. It was not a fun fight and having to run the entire path back to him... oof.
Failing jump mechanics would be heartbreaking, also. Purely as often it is not your fault. Ten second, thirty second setback is whatever. Thirty minutes would ruin me. Let's not.
Uhhh what else. I liked Lara's feral moment: good is not soft. She has a terrible day after Square dutifully kills their one other female character that fights, and your doe eyed protagonist should have moments of striking fear into those who have chosen to test her. I liked the ending: Lara got to see her parents one last time, I liked the Crimson Fire twist, there was some really good music playing during the tomb at the Mission of San Juan, I got to explore a Spanish galleon, temples galore. I liked an npc commenting on the thrill of discovery he could hear in Lara's voice, of seeing things unseen for thousands of years, and hoping she'd never lose that wonder. I did not like Lara's death cutscenes, which I never ever have, but if you're fast enough you can checkpoint reload before you have to see it and spare yourself watching spike impalement. Honestly the most heinous of these was during an escape sequence in Paititi, if the guard catches you they joyously hack you to pieces in the street whilst Lara screams, and that is way, way too 2013 Tomb Raider for me, which is why I never played it. It's just torture porn. It bothers me that there are cutscenes people had to make for every single location which is just Lara screaming and dying in brutal ways, it's not necessary. Men of the genre don't have this happen to them, your defining woman does not need it either. It also bumps the rating: there's a lot of stabbing going on in the closing hours but you don't see any of it on screen and there's no blood either?? The most gruesome thing was in the opening couple hours with a recently mauled, blood soaked half body asset being thrown at you from a jaguar's maw but most of the time unless it's Lara out of combat deaths, nothing.
Anyway, I give it a solid "it was fine", music was consistently great, it looked beautiful, narrative was not ground breaking but it wasn't a bad story to tell by any stretch. Once I decide what to do re: DLC tombs, it's probably time for Endwalker, where I'll be wishing for Mayan and Incan ruins, and what Dawntrail could have been...
The DLC unfortunately returns to the format that I remember Rise using for its tombs, in that they're all designed around timed puzzles so you can run them quickly to get a higher score and then trophies. I sincerely do not care for timed puzzles that require me to double back half a dozen times because I missed activating something by a fraction of a second. I want to explore it's about the aesthetic and vibes. I want to take my time solving a puzzle myself, but not in a repetitive way. I was perhaps two thirds of the way through the first DLC tomb and so frustrated and having so little fun that I had reached the point of "I don't care I just want it to be over" and used a walkthrough to get out. I am hesitant to do any more of them frankly, but trophies.
I was thinking about maybe doing a Deadly Obsession run in NG+, which is the hardest difficulty of the game with no checkpoints and reduced campfires, which can be done reasonably quickly in NG+ if you get all the gear you need and max out your resources before you start the file. The final boss arena changed my mind on this entirely because I can foresee losing hours of my life to running this sequence.
The problem is. This game isn't great with full combat no stealth opportunity segments. It's not built like that. Even the sequence you are forced to stealth in, when you lose all your gear, can quickly go south with the AI being so keen to beeline towards where you've concealed yourself to give you the opportunity to do an assassination takedown, only there's usually three of the guy's buddies watching this happen. During the oil fields I ended up giving on stealth and just hack and slashing through a couple of encounters, as there's one occasion the enemies have infrared goggles and you can't do anything about it to avoid being caught so you feel extra rushed. But I feel like, watching a walkthrough could make that doable, if you follow the steps around the arena and make full use of everything.
For pure combat where you don't get the option to stealth, there's four sequences for it. The first is where you can one shot the enemies coming in in waves, it's endurance for quantity, mainly, and to teach you how to use your shotgun you just got. After that you get smaller waves every time you successfully complete a puzzle, and the arena's are nice and open and you can jump into water to reset distance if necessary, as their AI largely is set to just run at you as wolves do. The second sequence is a badass moment, where Lara Is Pissed And She Is The Monster, she goes completely feral because deputy bad guy claims he has killed her best friend (and hasn't actually), and she rises out of the water with her rifle and wastes them. She even gets to have her one "fuck" line in the game during this scene. It felt very difficult to lose this fight - a refinery is exploding around you, and stuff is going on in the background outside the arena to aid you. The third sequence has similar background stuff to help you out and you get a token amount of cover. The entire final sequence to the last boss is the fourth, all the way to deputy bad guy's defeat, but you have endless allies spawning during this to make it easier for you.
These are, in a way, all set pieces? The last boss is not that. Pre fight, you have to destroy some idols, and each time you do it breaks the trance it has on his cronies so you fight 1-3 of them, simple enough. Once the fight starts he has five phases, he gets a shield around him and you simply run up and stab it, and after this summons two ads. His fourth phase, he throws Lara into the center of the arena and summons his ads as usual, but it's quite possible you won't have time to move before he lunges at you which knocks you to the floor and lets the ads kill you for free. This happened so many times. These ads require at least 3-4 arrows each, 2-3 shotgun pellets, and you don't have time to take your time with the boss running at you. In retrospect I probably should have used the fear arrows on them so they would take each other out but Man. It was not a fun fight and having to run the entire path back to him... oof.
Failing jump mechanics would be heartbreaking, also. Purely as often it is not your fault. Ten second, thirty second setback is whatever. Thirty minutes would ruin me. Let's not.
Uhhh what else. I liked Lara's feral moment: good is not soft. She has a terrible day after Square dutifully kills their one other female character that fights, and your doe eyed protagonist should have moments of striking fear into those who have chosen to test her. I liked the ending: Lara got to see her parents one last time, I liked the Crimson Fire twist, there was some really good music playing during the tomb at the Mission of San Juan, I got to explore a Spanish galleon, temples galore. I liked an npc commenting on the thrill of discovery he could hear in Lara's voice, of seeing things unseen for thousands of years, and hoping she'd never lose that wonder. I did not like Lara's death cutscenes, which I never ever have, but if you're fast enough you can checkpoint reload before you have to see it and spare yourself watching spike impalement. Honestly the most heinous of these was during an escape sequence in Paititi, if the guard catches you they joyously hack you to pieces in the street whilst Lara screams, and that is way, way too 2013 Tomb Raider for me, which is why I never played it. It's just torture porn. It bothers me that there are cutscenes people had to make for every single location which is just Lara screaming and dying in brutal ways, it's not necessary. Men of the genre don't have this happen to them, your defining woman does not need it either. It also bumps the rating: there's a lot of stabbing going on in the closing hours but you don't see any of it on screen and there's no blood either?? The most gruesome thing was in the opening couple hours with a recently mauled, blood soaked half body asset being thrown at you from a jaguar's maw but most of the time unless it's Lara out of combat deaths, nothing.
Anyway, I give it a solid "it was fine", music was consistently great, it looked beautiful, narrative was not ground breaking but it wasn't a bad story to tell by any stretch. Once I decide what to do re: DLC tombs, it's probably time for Endwalker, where I'll be wishing for Mayan and Incan ruins, and what Dawntrail could have been...
