I broke down & reinstalled Shadow of the Tomb Raider fearing I hadn’t given it enough of a chance. I’ll probably sink a few more hours but good Christ, the folks from Naughty Dog need to sit the Crystal Dynamics team down for a lecture on affordance design.
Some of the traversal is in 90s-adventure-game territory. “Read the designer’s mind! Is this the intended solution, or will it kill you? The only way to find out is sitting through a half dozen gory deaths and loading screens! Whee!”
“You’re facing two enemies. Normally Lara would gun them down in an orgy of effortless sociopathy, but this is a chase setpiece, so you’ll discover your weapons are randomly offline. Have fun trial-and-erroring your way through!”
The pseudo-cinematic action setpieces are TEDIOUS. I mean, that’s almost impressive.
The bizarre thing is *the previous two installments didn’t have this problem*. It’s like they un-learned.
The story is also somehow more nonsense. Not that I’m looking for narrative depth in a Tomb Raider game, but it’s faintly insulting that they made *everything* worse than the prior two.
