Tomb Raider is gonna be out September 14th for 59.99 for the
PCX box and ps4 also one thing to mention the embargo on this. is insanely
tight on restricting what can be shown after particular locations so you’ll
just have to sort of deal with this footage we’ll be able to see some later
locations after that embargo drops as always if you liked the video maybe
subscribe.
so here’s my review for shadow of the Tomb Raider Muay Thai
shinbones cringer from he-man as a bad guy and answering that age-old question
does Laura belong in a museum graphics art first yeah its Tomb Raider. which
means for the most parts a well laid out an organic world it’s got a mixture
complex architectures for the puzzles and well laid traps from ancient
civilizations looking pretty good overall
this really isn’t gonna shatter the graphical foundations of
current titles as we see though one area that does look fantastic is when Laura
gets covered with mud and looks like a cross between Arnold Schwarzenegger from
the predator and a third-degree burn victim hilarity aside when she leaps into
the bushes or crawls along the wall there’s this epic look and feeling to
everything and it does a really insane job selling that she’s finally actually
coming into her own a bit when it comes to abilities now character phases and
texture and run from okay to excellent.
but sometimes it can border a little bit on the odd whenever
you go to a busy spot you can end up talking to a group of people and all of
them look identical warning us of both the limits of Technology as well as the
dangers of banging our own cousins now that being said they still look good or
a bit better than rise depending on where you are but it’s the locations that
are both the strengths of and the weaknesses here in this Tomb Raider game
South America’s incredibly organic.
it’s got lush
vegetation and location to hideout and wait to put another ventilation hole in
an enemy’s head or when you dive face-first into a deep puzzle cave like a
human submarine powered by only curiosity and a complete lack of personal
safety requirements the lighting overall in those looks fantastic also since
you can turnoff exploration pathing the game can go from a spot to spot sprint
where it looks like someone painted every single cliff Craig carabineer and
cavern edge with a white paint like a giant team of safety engineers came
before you and said man we just can’t have people die in here and then you turn
it off which allows you to basically have to figure out and look exactly when
and where you can go and this adds a bit of danger that to me is something that
I think every game should add if it has this kind an exploration now many of
the animations both in and out of combat do have some similarities to rise
don’t expect anything to be fully different.
but I think most people understand that unfortunately when
you look at the locations rise just had more interesting locations overall for
me personally almost the entire game of shadows based in the jungle and after a
couple hours it can feel a little bit Samey when it comes to performance the
ps4 is 1080p on the Pro and the X it’s 1080p 60fps or 4kat 30fps and with the
PC it’s whatever FPS your bank account and throw at it now HDR is an option
here it works well to increase the overall picture quality but this is not
earth shattering Horthy’s footage here you’ll see from me is both native 4k at
30 as well as 1080p at60 I found the 60fps better overall as I played with
exploration and its safety markers off after initial testing and required a
little bit faster reflexes overall one element though that rises above anything
in any of the Tomb Raider games prior are the underwater sections here they
Trump anything that’s ever been done they’re huge they require a bit of
survival thinking as well they’re tense and they’re fully 360 making it feel
like this otherworldly place it’s one of the few games where underwater levels
really do add a feeling of exploring something unique and as large as your over
world areas.
I think shadow of the Tomb Raider looks good but it doesn’t
really elevate itself above rise we don’t have the ray-tracing because the NVidia
cards aren’t here for that it does look good but there’s nothing here that
really masters that magnificence of the geothermal valley in the original game.
so overall excellent but I would have loved a little bit
more variety sound music and voice the next volume picks up in Syria. I think
we can get out that way Jonah help me with this on three two one. let’s do
sound first this is actually really good this builds on the magnificent sound
structure that Rhys had and absolutely elevates it the first time you enter
into an underwater abyss of some cave complex long flooded after all the
natives inside use it for a cannibal circus it can get downright eerie with all
those sounds muffling perfectly the sound effects also have an excellent punch
to them but when walking through the jungle or just exploring you can hear all
manner of environmental sounds which really do elevate the entire surrounding
into feeling like. you’re really exploring a jungle sound has never been a
problem with these titles and it continues to be excellent here music so this
is actually a combination of composers who work on this with the main music
handled by Bryan Oliveira whose use of native South American instruments does a
really fantastic job acting as this audio concrete to solidify the foundation
of the score with the location but also you have Martin Anderson who’s recently
worked on limbo and inside who handles the eerie moments in the underwater
sections where the music changes dramatically that’s one thing to remember here
is that you have those big changes with the underwater sections where you
really are in them a lot when compared to the other games I’d say this might be
a little less cinematic but overall it fits perfectly with the game and I liked
it a lot voice.
so again we have Camilla Ludington play this character does
a really good job as well as handle the motion capture for the game and she
continues to offer a nice sophistication to Laura as you’re bouncing around on
ceremoniously off the logs into spike pits into fiery pyres in an all manner of
hazards this is a slightly different lower than the past ones where it was a
bit more of a silent bravado but also there was some careworn tacked to her
voice then here she’s a bit more vocal about what’s going on as a whole and that
adds a nice human feeling to it when she starts to realize that somersaulting
into someone’s ancient tombs and kicking the ever living shit out of all their priceless.
heirlooms is probably gonna have some kind of repercussion
though while I liked Laura and who she partners with I didn’t think the main
enemy ever really resonated with me at all instead coming across as some
generic bad guy whose awesome boss died the day before he was suddenly thrust
into a leadership role men just froze it’s not bad it just doesn’t really do
anything for me Jonah on the other hand continues to be excellent with a nice
rendition of the side dude with the tude being split down the middle with a
caring older bigger brother and now it’s time for the big dog which is gameplay
and a bit about the story now Tomb Raider starts where let’s be honest I think
they all should have started and that’s Lara and deeps hit set a bit after Rhys.
she’s gotten herself into trouble once again by setting the
stage for the end of the world supposedly she’s fresh off stealing an ancient
relic that can maybe possibly bring on the apocalypse and then comes right in
the crosshairs of an organization Trinity which also wants the relic for
themselves so they can reshape the world if they combine it with another relic
convoluted you ask surprisingly enough not really you see while you do
investigate these main elements as a story much of tomb Raider’s refreshingly
free of that constant narrative hanging moment and instead shows both a micro
and macro side of Laura’s actions as she plays out with these big cut scene moments
offsetting the more subdued telling of this frantic person trying to fight the
wrongs that.
she’s done as well as her continual discovering of new abilities
she has taken for instance those news kills Laura can stealth with the best of
a now covering herself in question really made up mud and hiding in vines for
unsuspecting enemies or now she ‘sable to lower and rappel off rock faces which
offers a flexibility to movements well as the puzzle makeup.
but I said it before and I got to say it again it’s the
underwater areas that astound me I’m telling you she might as well have gills
not because she can hold her breath forever though she’d probably make a deep-sea
diver a bit jealous it’s just that the areas are massive with their own
gameplay elements like hiding an underwater Flora’s piranha swim over your head
and trust me if they even get close to you you’re dead now these underwater
sections are also silent she can’t narrate obviously and it offers an excellent
negative space to work with once you start to move around the game’s map and
explore as you’re doing so you’re gonna notice some similarities as well as a
couple differences with Rhys when it comes to similarities of course you’re
exploring strange tombs finding secrets and discovering new locations and I’m gonna
say that there were a couple different climbs that you’re gonna find here that
give you that stomach tingly feeling as you’re thousands of feet above the
jungle and the only thing keeping you up is a very suspect cord with a hook at
the end but when it comes to the stealth that really does change up the way
Laura plays as well as the AI and the ability to breakoff and come back to
battle that I felt offered something unique here now when it comes to the
skills they’re upgradeable just as we’ve had before. but they have a South
American artistic slant to them which admittedly made knowing what each skill
did or remembering them actually a little bit harder than I think they overall
planned it’s a small quibble but you can notice it now the skills run the gamut
from auto searching enemies during kills to swimming longer finding more items
and stashes and so forth nothing really surprising here and a good connection
to the prior games there are a couple cool skills when it comes to story
unlocked ones of course the one thing we’ve heard a lot about is this hub world
kind of area and how the game offers side quests it is massive.
I’ll give them that with a couple city towns that do an
excellent job offering a more subtle background to the action-packed antics of
the prior games here you can listen to native stories discuss the ongoing
situations with those that didn’t have it the towns and even trade for items at
shops that’s actually one of the bigger changes is it does sort of allow for
these folks who maybe are missing out on one element when you ‘replaying that
you need to craft something with and it gives you the ability to just outright
maybe buy that if you want to sell some of your other valuable items it’s a
nice changeup and it didn’t really break the pace.
Tomb Raider though would suck if of course the control
wasn’t pretty spot-on and I can say itis mostly depending on the difficulty you
can turn off the auto aim which offers a nice extra bump and skill but the way
the aiming works seems like there’s some sort of acceleration just enough that
finding a bead on the enemy can take a bit more time than it shoulders at least
getting used to stealth kills of course are amazing.
but the AIis not really improved since the original game
sure you can now sort of hide from enemies and disengage and scuttle around but
they’re not really much more intelligent than they were in the last game so if
the AI bothered you in the last tumor a derp probably gonna bother you here one
thing that this Tomb Raider does is it adds a ton of accessibility options so
you can make combat easy and puzzle solving hard and exploration in the middle
ground or set them all to the hardest then in the audio section you have a ton
of settings like the ability to hear the Games NPC is talking their native
tongue or in your specified language.
you can do big subtitles colored subtitles and a couple
other options this is very useful for those who may need that kind of thing or
sit far away from the TV and maybe you can’t see a subtitle this game lasts
about 15 hours for the main story which is pretty much exactly the same as the
last game and then you add in the challenge tombs and all of the secret son top
of it in fact overalls a bit longer than Rhys because it does have more
challenge tombs as well as those extended water exploration sections which of
course just due to their makeup don’t allow you to really rush like the
Overland sections do all this of course also depends like.
I said on the difficulty on if you play stealthy or shoot it
out and so forth fun factor so there’s really no denying there are some amazing
moments here like wrapping an enemy around the neck with a well-placed rope
arrow and then yanking them to choke them out or that first time you leap into
the roots overhanging cliff and Laura sort of blends in and you want to whisper
her hair like the predator these are amazing moments in the game and it does
seem to sway a bit more towards the tomb raiding and not the life finding that
the past games have had it does in fact overall feeless like. you’re exploring
the jungle one enemy death at a time versus actually exploring it yourself that
being said that sense of exploration for me despite the massive and amazing
underwater areas was hurt a bit compared to Rhys
it’s that lack of incredibly defined locations that Rhys had
that made it feel like such a difficult act to follow shadow tries to up the
ante with this large hub based area and tons of people to interact with but
they suffer the same thing I think the smaller locations and Rhys actually did
and that’s limited interaction I liked those spots though they just didn’t
really offer exactly what I was hoping for with Rhys I really felt like one
thing that elevated it was those challenged tombs and I got to say deep in a
challenge to him here my god the game can be a blast well-greased ancient
mechanisms that somehow move easier than your own kitchen cabinet doors do
await you at every turn as you try to figure out how to get a puzzle with
countless pieces all moving in the same direction all while staving off myriad
traps and dangers set around you.
it works really well so as you guys know every games on a
bye wait for a sale rent or never touch it again rating scale with rent being
replaced by deep sale on PC this is a buy but it’s tentative you really need to
understand what you’re going into if you like to rise you’ll probably like this
if you like the challenge tombs of Ryzen you will probably like this even more
there’s a lot of unique elements and those underwater spots in this game really
do show what somebody could do if they aimed and focused just on that at the
same time though when you’re exploring you do notice that most of the time it
is just that jungle and that can get a little bit dreary over long periods of
time I gotta say I was pretty surprised this game I wasn’t necessarily expecting
it to go away from the bloodshed of Ryze and just the over ballistics that that
game sometimes offered and sort of set it back just a little bit here offer
more challenge tombs and that exploration in that sense of tom braiding in this
game is incredibly high so for people who maybe weren’t a fan of rise as much
weren’t a fan of that ballistic exploration you didn’t rise where apparently
you’re using shotguns for compasses this sort of replaces that so anyway.
that’s it for me I hope you guys liked the video if you did
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week