Shadow of the Tomb Raider review: "All that for another riddle"

Shadow of the Tomb Raider feels like the last dying breath of a particularly insufferable breed of AAA game, one that goes well beyond the old "dark, gritty re-imagining" cliché that we've been mocking since 2004, when the Prince of Persia screamed "YOU BITCH!" at a woman in a steel thong. That was just lame and embarrassing. Shadow is grimy, unpleasant and gross.

To discuss Shadow as a game feels like a waste of time, because it's exactly like the last two, which is to say that it flits so haphazardly between genres that it lacks an identity of its own beyond its desire to showcase elaborate environments. And even that's more of a nuisance than anything, since the levels are so visually cluttered that we need to keep activating detective mode to highlight all of the interactive objects in bright orange. Every time we do, Lara blurts out the objective, over and over. Have to raise that bell somehow. Have to raise that bell somehow. Have to raise that bell somehow.

You may have noticed something peculiar about the screenshots I'm using here. Right out of the box, Shadow comes with several alternate skins for Lara, one of which transforms her into the vintage low-poly-count version from the PS1 days. I highly recommend that you take advantage of this. It's the only hint of self-awareness present in Shadow, and the only thing that kept me sane as I was beaten relentlessly with the melodrama stick.

I don't know where these new Tomb Raider games got the idea that they have anything interesting to say. Their plots are pure serial, no weightier than an Indiana Jones or an Uncharted or any action-adventure in which an explorer traces a series of riddles in order to uncover some mystical artifact that houses a terrible power and, yeah, probably should have just stayed buried. The difference is that those two franchises are lighthearted in tone. Their heroes don't take any of this seriously because they don't inhabit the real world.

Tomb Raider, bless its little heart, actually wants to say something profound about violence. The material is certainly there. When the villain inevitably gives Lara the whole "And how many people have you killed?" spiel, he's got a point. Her actions in Shadow result in the deaths of thousands of people - not just gun-toting mercenaries, but actual innocent bystanders. She's a maniac. She notices it, as does everyone else. Yet the game brings this up repeatedly without having the stones to address it in any meaningful way. Nothing is learned - not by Lara, and certainly not by Crystal Dynamics, who end Shadow with a blatant sequel hook as if another mass-murder crusade with this selfish asshole is something we want.

Shadow begins in Mexico, where everyone is wearing skull masks. Does it strike anyone else as a tad racist that Mexicans are only ever depicted as wearing skull masks? Do people really think Mexicans celebrate Day of the Dead year-round? Do Crystal Dynamics think we won't believe it's Mexico if we don't see any skull masks?

Anyway, Lara wears a poncho and a skull mask to blend in, but then wanders around a town square asking people questions in English, so good job. Her old pals Trinity are looking for an ancient dagger that, when combined with a special box, transforms its user into a god. Lara's good at solving puzzles and deciphering languages by now, and she ascertains from some Mayan murals that removing the dagger will create cataclysms - storms, earthquakes, volcanoes, anything that can cause the environments around Lara to collapse in a very over-elaborate and heavily scripted way while the player holds up on the analog stick, pretending to be involved.

She takes it anyway, of course, because she doesn't want it to fall into the wrong hands. Then she loses it because she gets hit once. Really. During an encounter with Dominguez, the main bad guy, one of his goons steps up behind Lara and strikes her with the butt of his rifle. She drops the dagger and Dominguez picks it up. After all of the punishment this series has piled onto Lara, a single pistol whip, it turns out, is all it takes to turn the tables.

And then a whole bunch of innocent bystanders die as the dagger brings to Cozumel its first cataclysm, a tsunami. The water that floods the streets is immediately dotted with fresh corpses. Lara has to actually push some of the bodies aside as she's swimming to safety (all while we're holding up on the analog stick, pretending to be involved). As she climbs to a safe rooftop, a child falls to his death. Lovely.

Now, look. A lot of horrific things happened in the 2013 reboot, but the context was different. Lara was new to this sort of thing and she was stranded on an uncharted island full of lunatics who wanted to murder her. She didn't have a choice. But she escaped, and now lives in a mansion with a cushy inheritance. That she chooses to re-enter this world of grisly violence tells me that she enjoys it, and certainly doesn't mind rolling over thousands of locals in search of her latest adrenaline fix.

Anyway, having decided she's killed enough people in Mexico, she flies to Peru, where she brings with her a plague of destruction. Seriously, her plane hasn't even landed before a massive storm rolls through and rains hell on the Amazon. The plane crashes, and the one character on board whom we hadn't previously met dies. Lara is fine, but she loses all of her gear. So, conveniently, she has to go re-acquire all of the stuff that she obtained in the first two games.

She finds one of those "hidden cities" that always show up in stories like these, i.e. a city that's in broad daylight and therefore managed to stay hidden because, I guess, no one flew over that area with a plane or helicopter. Curiously, it's still close enough to civilization that an oil refinery is right downriver, though I suspect it's there purely so Lara can blow some stuff up in a frenzied rampage when she thinks her dumb friend has been killed.

Right, Jonah's back. Do me a favor and describe Jonah without mentioning anything about his appearance. You can't. I hate this character, and I hate that rash decisions are constantly being made for the sake of keeping him out of harm's way. Lara doesn't even flinch over the deaths of probably a quarter of the population of South America, but point a gun at this one guy with zero defining characteristics and watch the hell out. Anyway, one of the bad guys tells Lara over the radio that he's killed Jonah, and she believes him, because she's the only person who thinks that anything of consequence can happen to important people in this world.

The main villain has set up a cult in the hidden city, so some of the inhabitants want to complete the ritual while the rest side with the other psychopath. Some Gollum-like subterranean creatures are involved, and Lara spends a lot of time underwater, either engaging in stealth sequences wherein players avoid schools of piranhas (yes, really), or really struggling to fit through a very thin crack and acting as if she's in any danger so long as players are holding up on the analog stick, pretending to be involved.

The villain eventually completes the ritual and becomes Kukulkan, the god of glowing. Lara justifies her presence by shooting him a bunch. After the credits roll, we cut to a scene in which Lara is back at her estate, writing a letter to (who else?) Jonah, contemplating her role in these affairs: "I thought that taking control of my life meant venturing out to do something extraordinary. I thought I had to fix everything. But the mysteries of the world are to cherish more than to solve."

Yes! Finally we're getting somewhere. To quote one of my favorite games, a corpse should be left well alone. Yes, Lara, maybe this is more trouble than it's worth. Maybe it's pointless and you should just stop inserting yourself into every--

"I am just one of their many protectors."

Oh, go to hell, Lara. This is all your fault. You just obliterated half of Mexico and Peru because you're too rich to not be the center of attention. If you'd just stayed in bed that day, maybe Dominguez wouldn't have found the artifacts he needed to ascend to godhood. Or maybe he would have, in which case someone else with a gun inevitably would have stopped him, because apparently that's all it takes.

She's not done: "I'm not sure what the future holds in store, Jonah. But whatever adventure's on the horizon, I can't wait to meet it."

I mean, I have a rough idea of what the future holds. There'll be another ancient artifact for you to "protect," and you'll fail to protect it because Jonah got stung by a bee or whatever, the villain uses it, and then either his greed will bring about his downfall, or bullets will. Hundreds of locals will die in the process, but as long as upper-one-percent Lara and her space-wasting best friend get off scot-free, they'll be primed for another one of these wacky population-wiping adventures.

Or perhaps the future holds yet another reboot, in which one of gaming's most iconic heroes goes back to being one.