Shadow Of The Tomb Raider: PS4 Review

Shadow Of The Tomb Raider: PS4 Review

Released by Square Enix
Platform: PS4

The Lara Croft reboot series has been a brilliant shot in the arm that the game needed.

The first re-energised Lara and gave her an origin story that was intriguing and engaging; the second built on the promise of the first and added puzzles and tomb raiding to the series to show the foundations were more than solid.

But with the third, the pressure's really on - because most of the new dynamics have been put into place prior and there's nowhere to hide.

In this latest, and set after events of Rise Of The Tomb Raider, Lara's quest against Trinity, the shadowy organisation that's been haunting her life, steps up. Set in south America in the legendary city of Paititi, Lara has to stop an apocalypse after things go slightly awry.

Camilla Luddington returns to the role of Lara, giving the latest a feeling of a trilogy of work (and certainly an ending hints at this being the conclusion of a cycle, rather than a direct continuation) and a sense of a character arc.

Much of the emphasis lies on tomb raiding this time around, and exploring caves, and the darker visuals sometimes make gameplay a little harder to stand out. There's a little less emphasis on combat this time around, and really the focus is about rounding Lara out to be more of a tomb raiding individual than just a cypher for actions and moments.

It does mean that parts of Shadow Of The Tomb Raider feel a lot like stuff you've seen before - but the character work that's put in doubles down on ensuring there's less sense of ennui than could become evident after a while.

While there may be edges of Indiana Jones about Lara's escapades, Luddington and the writing team go into overtime to ensure that she never loses her voice in the melee, and as a result, while the game may suffer from a feeling of over-familiarity, it's still a solidly executed, if slightly unspectacular, episode in the ongoing retooling of the Lara Croft series.