How fitting to have a game with an apocalypse theme these days. Possibly more appropriate back in the latter parts of 2020 when I was actually playing it, but still reasonably apropos.
Short version: if you liked this game the first two times you played it, it's back for some more.
Spoilers from here, if you care.
Shadow of the Tomb Raider is the third in a reboot trilogy of one of the original console all-stars. I played a couple of them back in the day; I really only remember the first one, and that's partially because Lara was really cool. Even aside from the unlikely body shape, she had a sarcastic sense of humor and a seen-it-all demeanor that she backed up with the ability to backflip twelve feet in the air while firing a pistol in each hand John Woo style. Apparently they ran the gameplay into the ground and they started over, with Lara just out of college on her first adventure, and in that game they substituted extreme trauma for character development, beating the ever living hell out of her over and over again. Then in the first sequel, they redid all the plot beats from the first time a second time, but out in the Russian wilderness. And here they are again, with a couple of differences in the South American jungle.
They threw in so much stuff here that it almost chokes the actual gameplay. In the first game in the series, you had one weapon of each of four types, and there was generic "salvage" that you could get in various ways. Get enough salvage and you could upgrade the characteristics of your weapons, get some parts and you could upgrade the weapons themselves. Admittedly it doesn't make a lot of sense that you could "upgrade" a gun into a whole different model of gun, but <shrug>. In the second game they decided to take a different approach and add different resource types - antlers, animal hides, machine parts, and so on. Upgrading required different amounts of those things so it didn't help to grind for the ones you didn't need. And this time you had a bunch of different weapons, but the characteristic upgrades were consistent across all of them.
This time they went completely gonzo. There's five different kinds of animal hides (including both regular and deluxe jaguar pelts), three different types of feathers, oil, black powder, two different kinds of venomous insects, four different medicinal herbs with different combat effects, and many others. You have an absolute crap ton of different weapons and each one has to be separately upgraded. You also can refurbish different outfits, many of which are cosmetic only but many others which give you really good combat bonuses. And they still have the usual collections of documents, artifacts, buried survival caches and weird hidden subquests. I'm sort of a completion fanatic, so I did all that stuff (I didn't entirely upgrade all the weapons though - that borders on total masochism) but you don't really have to. The initial weapons are all pretty good and you could easily get by just using them. In fact I really liked the starting pistol and used it in preference to all the menagerie of pistols I picked up along the way. The skill tree is also way out of whack. A couple of the skills are absolutely vital - in particular the one that prevents you from having to hit a QuickTime event to avoid falling to your death on tough ledges - but most of them just aren't that useful and some of them seem like they should be useful but aren't really. For instance, the ability to simultaneously headshot three enemies with your bow sounds awesome, but there aren't just a ton of places where they line up for you to do this easily and by the time you can earn enough skill points to unlock this ability, all your enemies have taken to wearing helmets anyway.
There's much less of an emphasis on combat in this one; there are a couple of big setpiece battles throughout, but there's more focus on Lara being a glass cannon as opposed to the combat in the first two, which encouraged more of a bull-in-the-china-shop style of gameplay. It seemed to me that Lara could take a lot fewer hits, but combined with this you have a lot more options for stealth killing and disengaging from your enemies even during fights. By a certain point in the game you can basically freeze time to line up headshots though, so I actually thought the combat toward the end was much easier. Overall, I thought it worked pretty well. They also eliminated the massive ammo caches everywhere, so you do need to make your shots count (or rely on the bow, which has free craftable arrows). Offsetting this is that there are actual merchants now, and they do sell bullets for cash, but it's extraordinarily expensive to rely on that.
The developers also added a couple of extra platforming tools to Lara's repertoire. In the second game, the major innovation was the ability to swing from hooks. In this one you maintain that ability, but you can also anchor from climbable walls to rappel down or to run along walls, which is frequently used. You also gain the ability to overhang climb, which looks cool and is neat enough, but seems to be almost an afterthought in terms of how frequently it's used. While these new tricks make Lara more able to traverse space, they also seem to have made her somewhat less responsive than before - I found myself plunging to my death with somewhat more frequency than I recall from the first two games.
I bought the super deluxe extended version of the game on sale somewhat after release, which gets an extra 7 DLC sidequests. I thought that the Baba Yaga DLC sidequest in the second game was actually the gameplay highlight of the whole thing, and they did seem to pour a lot of their creativity into these extra challenge tombs; if you're looking to get this game, that's the way to go. I think it's also the only way to reasonably get enough XP to fill out the skill tree without having to do an abnormally large amount of grinding.
So that's the gameplay basics out of the way. What about the plot? Yeah, okay, about that. In the second game it was revealed that there was a secret organization called Trinity that was all about finding immortality and other Illuminati-mind-control type conspiracy theories. So here fairly early on we're introduced to Pedro Dominguez, who is the leader of this group, and who also turns out to have been born into a tribal society in a hidden city deep in the South American jungles. Overlooking the fact that this is the third hidden secret civilization in this series which also ostensibly has satellite mapping and cell phones, this is absolutely an astounding career path, and incidentally has the effect of making him far more interesting than Lara herself. She once again starts off by getting involved in stuff she doesn't understand and doesn't really have to get involved in, accidentally triggering the apocalypse unless she can recover the magic dagger she removed as well as some other MacGuffins and doing a ritual or whatever.
I mean, I could try to explain it but I don't really care that much, and what's worse is the game doesn't really seem to either. Dominguez wants the power of the dagger to become a god and do some sort of vaguely sketched out bullshit that's probably bad. He allegedly wants to protect the hidden village where he comes from, so it's interesting that he has infiltrated and taken over the secret society that's already been running the village for its own ends for a few centuries, but no particular tension is ever explored with this double or triple loyalty stuff, and then the game just sort of loses interest in resolving the Trinity plot and they all just get killed offscreen except final boss Dominguez and some other guy whose name I forget but who runs all the mercenary teams.
And once again Lara causes a crap ton of collateral damage with her clumsy attempts to get in the way of stuff she doesn't understand; this time moving the dagger causes a bunch of disasters which destroy a few villages and kill a lot of people. She feels vaguely guilty about this but not guilty enough to stop messing around with stuff, and by the end appears to have no particular worries about what she's done. She also somehow manages to walk around within the secret South American village and be "disguised" as a member of a secret group of cultists, all of whom are male and much larger than her. Plus, she repeatedly obeys the rule of secrecy in the village and won't use her firearms openly there, even when involved in a bunch of fights to the death.
Don't get me wrong, the emphasis on stealth killing and camouflage provides an interesting contrast to the gameplay of the prior two chapters, and the game is entertaining enough, but it takes itself far too seriously while making absolutely no sense whatsoever. So if you enjoyed the last two installments, you'll get at least camp value out of this one. And it seems like even the developers aren't interested in returning to the well a fourth time with this exact formula, so perhaps they'll manage to match up the gameplay and tone in another sequel.
