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New tomb RaiderThe coolest idea is that of the floating question: what happens if all this looting of tombs that Lara Croft does indicates that it is a jolt that plunders treasures and destroys the culture of other people and, worse, their lives?
In spite of self-reflection, this question implies Shadow of the Tomb Raider It's not a sad buzzkill. It's fun and beautiful and it's a long adventure full of fun tomb RaiderThings It builds on the strong traditions of the 22-year franchise and utilizes most of the intelligent exploration and combat systems launched in 2013. tomb Raider restart and fine-tuned in 2015 Rise of the Tomb Raider.
Once again, you make your way to an exotic, climbing place and solve your problems through tombs, ruins and enemy installations. Once again, you engage in a combination of platform, problem solving, exploration and combat, usually sneaking with a bow and arrow before alerting a guard and of move on to a shootout. Once again, you gradually increase your level of Lara Croft when you reach more experience points and virtual gold to spend on new skills, new outfits and new weapons.
But perhaps this sequel invites players to think, all this stealing of hidden artifacts from other cultures is not the most enlightened cause.
In Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Lara Croft's Mexico adventure in the jungles of Peru to overtake a fanatical Christian militia called Trinidad in a quest to obtain artifacts that could unleash the end of the world. Trinity, a malicious and well-armed secret society, are the main villains in the new franchise timeline, which began with the reboot of 2013. Croft's excesses in pursuing buried treasure are often motivated by the fact that they also hunt the object in question, often with the intention of using it for harmful purposes. It remains no less than at the beginning of the game, Croft takes a precious object into a grave and drops a cataclysm of death. Her best friend, Jonah, tries to reassure her that it's not her fault, but that her words sound wrong. The fact remains that when Lara Croft falls in town, things break down. Hell, half the time, she is the one swinging the ax.
The question of Croft's moral legacy is posed throughout the game, mainly in cinematics. This also occurs in the many conversations she may have with ordinary civilians whose hidden villages and towns have the mixed fortune of being about to reach their next desired treasure. It is quite unusual for the game to fill the world with people to talk to, dramatically expanding players' ability to take a break from jungle exploration on their way to the city and through scripted conversations. It is even more striking that some of these people and Croft herself express doubts about the quality of her job.
"It's unfortunate that you are not a tourist," she says at the beginning of a woman in a small Peruvian town that has already been ravaged by an oil drilling company. "Tourists bring in money. Archaeologists have just taken.
Later in the game, Croft goes deeper into the jungle and discovers a small town called Paititi, which is full of people with their own problems and possibilities. At this point, she seems to have realized her potential to cause collateral damage. "I had not planned anything," she says. "I was waiting at an old place – artifacts, graves – I could not imagine … people. I was so focused on the track of clues that I did not even stop asking myself. I did not want to interfere … but Trinity is here.
Players can choose to change the game's default language settings so that more locals speak their own language: Spanish or Yucatec Maya, mainly. They can turn on subtitles to get translations of what the non-English characters in the periphery of the gaming cities say or prevent them from impregnating the local dialect and the feeling of being a stranger.
The abundance of ordinary people on Lara Croft's last trek makes the difference in this game compared to its predecessors. There are sections of Shadow of tomb Raider where Croft explores the Peruvian jungle alone, plunging into tombs and crypts and browsing some of the most lavish video game landscapes I've ever seen. These stretches will feel more familiar to those who played the previous games, but Shadow begins to establish his own identity when Croft arrives in town and starts talking to locals.
In the impressive central area of Païtiti, there are farmers and housewives, shamans and merchants, rebel leaders and children, each with stories to tell. Few of these people are hostile to this white Brit who came out of the foliage with a weapon on her hip. Some are at least suspicious, others skeptical. Many are also eager to share their own hopes and stress. By pressing a button, players can hear them and perhaps give them a hand.
All this cat is not necessary to play. It is optional and serves to subtly represent the little listening or understanding of real or virtual life before getting what you want. The creators of Shadow of the Tomb Raider have strengthened their conversation systems and offer a series of non-violent side quests involving city residents, but that they can leave to those who wish to plunge into the graves, shoot the bad paramilitaries and follow the main story of the gamers who only do these things will, however, fail to experience a Lara Croft who is more of a listener and a helper, who can probably hear the story of the alien as much as she could find a buried trinket.
There are at least a few hours of these extra tips, some of which are spread over 13 optional side quests that provide a lot of ShadowBest moments, at least for those who will be satisfied with the well written interaction. A late-night conversation with a blind man gives a particularly elegant insight into Croft's character and is utterly impossible to understand.
For those who escape civil interactions, or even for those who do not, the good news is that the jungle gym of Shadow of the Tomb Raider is largely a step ahead of the climb already superbly enjoyable. There are a few other tombs in this one, more crawlable crypts, more challenging puzzles, extended underwater sequences and even improved stealth combat options, used for a slight reduction in the fight for an exploration. more classic.
The players who went through 2015 Rise of the Tomb Raider will find a lot of familiar material in Shadow. The plot is a continuation, as Trinity and his rulers were now tracking Croft through several games, and in the latter case, they were responsible for his father's death. Croft's move is essentially the same as in the last match, although Shadow respects the time of veteran players and does not require them to use return techniques, for example by shooting an arrow on a hole to form a zipline. The old crossing movements are there from the beginning, although very few new ones are added during the game. The design structure is also the same: players progress through a series of adjacent regions filled with tradition, loot, history missions and optional tombs, and can still save and travel quickly through dozens of refugee camps. based.
Some of these similarities may be due to the fact that Shadow was not made by the principal tomb Raider team at Crystal Dynamics. Although this studio helped development, this new game was largely developed by Eidos Montreal. The scale and level of detail of the game does not give it the impression of being a lazy production or a carbon copy, but it clearly builds on existing foundations and rarely departs from what has already been established .
There are lots of skills to unlock, some with skill points gained by gaining experience, others progressing through the story or completing the game's optional challenge tombs.
The game is different from the previous two by focusing more on the interactions between Lara Croft and other people, increasing the number of knowledge, tombs and crypts and ending up in Peru, although the jungle is a minor responsibility . . Its decor is beautiful, but Shadow of the Tomb Raider yet is yet another action adventure in a jungle, with nuances of multiple tomb Raider and Uncharted games before him. The tombs of this game, while scratching enough, especially with extinct clues, usually lack the architectural flair that could make them particularly memorable. The tropical setting does not lend itself to the aesthetic distinction and geographical ingenuity of Rise of the tomb RaiderSiberia less often explored. There is no tomb in Shadow half of Rise's ship trapped in a frozen waterfall.
More than its predecessors and similar adventures, Shadow of the Tomb Raider what players are doing. In addition to its innumerable side conversations and parallel adventures to redefine, Shadow provides players with an unusual granular control over the difficulty of the game and the degree of scrutiny and exploration required to progress. Players can modify three difficulty game sliders. They affect the toughness of the fight against enemies, the amount of clues given by Croft when he tries to solve the riddles of a grave and the measure in which the game environment is colored with clues on the ledges and tree branches that can be used for climbing. . The latter is a revelation, by removing the signs that often make the crossing in action-adventure games an act of following the instructions instead of exploring the observer. Players who remove crossing clues and other aids from the game will be forced to pay more attention to their environment, to watch and understand rather than to make their way through. (For even more immersion, players can change the default language from many English support characters to their native language, be it Spanish, Yucatec Mayan or Nahuatl. )
Rise of the Tomb Raider's Microtained Expeditions mode does not return for Shadow of the Tomb Raider. This time, the developers are offering a season pass that will allow players to try variations of existing challenge tombs like the one above and to get a new grave per month from October to April.
When game difficulty sliders are set to medium or low, Shadow of the Tomb Raider is a big budget trip. It flies over a blur of cliffs to climb, chasms to cross, levers to shoot and deadly traps to avoid, as well as a series of high-speed action sequences involving villains or natural disasters.
Played on a higher combination of difficulty settings, everything is sharper. This is generally for the benefit of the game. After a diversion, it is transformed into a welcome test of spirit and navigation, in a visually stunning environment that makes you rock mountains, dive into underground rivers and cling to muddy walls.
Higher difficulty improves exploration and combat of the game. Graves filled with puzzles become chambers where you must scrutinize each crack to determine how to move forward. You can no longer assume that Croft will mumble clues about the solution if you are too long blocked. The fight is not that difficult, even when you log in, but at least in the case of higher difficulty, it requires stealthy use and pushes the player to experiment with many of Croft's skills. Unlike other recent ones Tomb RaidersEncounters with human enemies are extremely rare. The most common enemy is the wild Peruvian environment, which includes more aggressive animals. You can improve your bow and your weapons, but, just warnings, arrows and bullets do not help the piranhas.
The thoughtful script of the game is undermined by the word games used in the titles of challenge missions and achievements or trophies. Feel the pathos of people whose village has been ravaged by an oil company. Shoot a red barrel to activate a gun challenge "rough awakenings". Save the father of a sad little girl named Hakan and get the trophy "I think Hakan is flying".
Slowing down to play the game in a more cautious and methodical way supports the idea of a Lara Croft who becomes aware of how much she stomps when she makes a descent on a grave. Of course, it is still a game without real stakes in terms of destruction of real cultures. No matter how players play Lara Croft to become a more sensitive adventurer, many elements of the game are weakened by the gravitational pull of traditional big-budget video games. Many conversations with civilians, for example, produce new icons on the map. The reward for listening to someone's not really their story, is identifying something new to follow. Even non-violent quarrels to help people unblock new weapons or, in a strange case, after an elderly woman sincerely shares a philosophy of life with Croft, the discovery that she is a top trader. Push a button to see what it sells: oh, just a machine gun, a laser sight, gear and ammo. She did not seem to be the type.
And despite all the sensitivity that can be aroused by the writing of the game about the nature of caving in the caves of other countries, the game is filled with tombs littered with loot that are too easy and tempting to grasp. Here is a table of offerings halfway through a grave. There is a pile of jade on it. Should you press a button to pick it up so that it can be sold to a trader to get better outfits with beneficial benefits for the gameplay? Who can resist? This seems to be the best way to proceed and win. It's the trap of making a game that calls into question the morality of the raids on the graves while being a game of looting of the graves. At least they raised questions and gave players some leeway.
One of ShadowThe selling points of marketing are the return of underwater exploration. It's good to have it in the game, although it does not add anything to the fun.
Shadow of the Tomb Raider begins with a powerful proposition that Lara Croft should feel guilty about the kind of things she does and the unintended impact she has on the lives of innocent people. This unconventional beginning sets up an adventure that creeps and jumps in many fun and interesting ways. It ends up turning into a more conventional second half that gives the impression tomb Raider game, dropping any second hypothesis of Croft's mission while providing some last exciting scenes. This part is also good, but not as unusual and contrary to the type.
For all his adherence to the dogma series, a good part of Shadow of the Tomb Raider Feels improbably cool. In a familiar environment and familiar mechanics, it invites players to explore a familiar story in a different and more thoughtful way. It makes a difference if you listen to people, especially when they speak their own language. It makes a difference if you care about their stories.
In this tomb RaiderLara Croft is showing signs of renewal again, not as a serious survivor we met in 2013, but as a more complex character who actually talks to the people she met on her travels and understands the gravity of her actions. Many come to tomb Raider adventure and escape games, to visit beautiful places and solve insignificant puzzles. There is a lot of that in Shadow of the Tomb Raider, also. It all depends on how much, or how little, you want to dig and how much you want to play as Lara Croft.
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