DLCwolf Shadow of the Tomb Raider Review

Far fewer fights and shootouts: a choice I find more consistent with the “spirit” of Lara Croft. In the previous entries, as you progressed, you often ended up in pure shooter segments—intense, repetitive, and frankly not very believable—with endless hordes of savages, enemies, or other entities. Here, instead, combat encounters are rarer and less “explosive.” The flip side is that this restraint ends up making the wide variety of weapons (pistols, shotguns, assault rifles) and their upgrades feel a bit superfluous: what’s the point of all that choice if the moments when you actually use them heavily (i.e., beyond a few shots) are few and short? The real issue for me, though, isn’t weapon balancing: it’s Lara as a character. She should be an athletic, credible, hardened explorer. Instead, I often felt like renaming this chapter “Lara vs. Gravity,” because the game leans so heavily into climbing, jumping, and traversing cliffs, ravines, and bottomless precipices like never before. Every tomb seems built on the verge of collapse, always suspended over abyssal cracks, and the sections where Lara keeps jumping, climbing, swinging, and then ends up in those almost horizontal climbs lead me to an ironic but constant conclusion: her true enemy is gravity. A continuous fight against falling. And that’s where the dissonance starts: faced with such extreme feats, Lara feels unrealistic to me in her “tone” and in the way she is written and portrayed. She has a charisma and a posture that remind me more of a very “proper,” politically correct student than someone who spends half her life risking her skin among impossible ruins. Always perfectly groomed (exfoliating and soothing creams included), a near–beauty-contest physique, but without the musculature I would expect from someone who does what she does; paradoxically, I noticed that some secondary female characters (for example, the village shaman/chief) look more “built” and physically believable than Lara herself. Her voice and her reasoning often sound naïve to me too: always measured, always composed, always oriented toward “goodness,” love, moral righteousness. Never a word out of place, never a curse beyond a little yelp after a death-defying jump over a cliff that would swallow even the most seasoned mountaineer. She’s almost like a Miss Italia finalist repeating a slightly more elaborate version of the classic “I want world peace,” thrown into feats far beyond her. Obviously it “works” because it’s a video game, but for me this dissonance sticks in almost every scene—even in her facial expressions, often a bit too much like a grandmother’s “gentle worry” for a grandson who has to go out in the rain. And it’s a feeling I’ve carried through all three games of the trilogy. From what I’ve seen in the industry over the past few years, I also have the impression that this chapter was influenced by a kind of “product” rewrite, with a Netflix-series vibe: very feel-good, very polished, very careful never to clash. It’s a choice that doesn’t convince me, because it rounds off the character too much in a context that should instead dirty her up, harden her, crack something open emotionally, create a particular, unusual character—I'd even say a unique one. That said, credit where it’s due: visually and in terms of “pure” gameplay it’s genuinely pleasant. Character control, movement, and actions work well and are enjoyable to play. But for me it’s not enough to guarantee a really strong memory in the future, precisely because that contrast between “Lara written like this” and “Lara doing these things” remains constant. The setting also felt not very varied to me: for almost the entire game you’re in the Peruvian jungle and surrounding areas, on the mountain foothills, and in the long run I missed a sharper change of locations and atmospheres. On top of that, there’s the usual endless trail of corpses and remains everywhere, to the point that I found myself thinking that in these places nobody ever had the time or resources to bury the dead: skeletons, mummies, rotting bodies constantly along Lara’s path. So on one side, a game packed with human remains; on the other, a geography made of sheer drops, endless fissures, and improbable routes, where everything seems built on the edge of an abyss and communication paths are reduced to narrow ledges along slippery rock faces or to interminable climbs. And here my instinctive reaction slips out (and I’m keeping it because it’s part of my “diary”): Lara, wake up a bit. You come across like a well-mannered, composed girl, always balanced, always politically correct, with an almost psychoanalysis-worthy obsession for archaeological finds never seen before… yet dropped into a world that should break you and rebuild you differently. Grow up and get yourself together, you might say—not in an aesthetic sense, but in the sense of becoming believable compared to what you live through. Finally: it also felt a bit too long and at times tedious, given the limited variety in settings and twists. Forty hours, at least for the Definitive Edition, felt a bit heavy. And precisely on the Definitive Edition I have a major minus: why make “top-tier” weapons available right from the start (like a pistol and a rifle with very high stats), killing the sense of progression? In the original game, part of the pleasure was discovering weapons little by little and, above all, building upgrades that truly improve their characteristics. If you give me an almost “maxed-out” weapon immediately, you take away that satisfaction of starting basic and powering up gradually. For me, it’s an issue that kills the weapon scaling and that sense of reward.