Recent reviews by Ezra

The 90s aesthetic was a fun nostalgia trip, but the story didn't really do it for me.

Trombone sounds haunted my dreams after playing this game.

A clicker-style game without the RSI. An hour well spent.

Just one more hand...

I wonderful romp that doesn't overstay its welcome. Quicktime events and minor glitches are forgivable. I cannot overstate how well voice-acted this game is: you really feel like part of the bickering family that is the Guardians. The comedy is genuinely funny, and almost never feels forced. An excellent ride from start to finish.

Never played solo. Only played with friends. Amazing time had by all. I quote Starship Troopers movie lines while playing.

[This review assumes you've played Rise of the Tomb Raider]

I was on the fence about this game, teetering between recommending and not, and decided not to based on the unpleasant experiences that keep returning to my mind whenever I think about this game.

Mercifully, some of the skills and tricks you picked up in Rise of the Tomb Raider carried over, instead of the usual (and somewhat baffling) amnesia and asset liquidation that happen to franchise characters between their games. Unfortunately (for me, at least), so did all of the previous game's outfits. As with Rise, a number of outfits in Shadow of the Tomb Raider have benefits tied to some of them, but non of those carried across. This means that I had about a dozen other outfits to scroll past in order to preview the only outfits worth considering. What's more, most outfits would grey out because for story reasons, you weren't permitted to have much choice (and in some instances, no choice at all).

Lara's controls (m+kb) in Rise were a little bit janky; small enough to be forgivable. In Shadow, however, they decided to turn the (m+kb) jank up a couple of notches. Lara doesn't seem to respond to inputs on a regular basis, leading to some moments of frustration. For instance, when hanging off a ledge and looking at a ledge to leap across to, the game expects you to have your camera angled a certain way before she will make the jump. Otherwise, you can just hammer the space bar to no effect. This has led to some checkpoint reloads during timed puzzle traversals, which always felt like time wasted.

Unfortunately, a large portion of the game were environmental puzzles. Most of them were fun to work through, despite the ridiculously elaborate nature of all these traps and ancient machines. Again, though, the drawback to having so many puzzles is having to deal with the janky controls.

Combat was improved upon, with our superhero learning how to apply mud to herself like Rambo and perform Rambo-style take-downs from vine-covered walls, and Batman-like hanging rope kills. This further added to the ridiculousness of her combat prowess. The addition of the different poison type made for a fun option to have, but combat remains fairly easy once you eliminate most enemies using stealth. Unfortunately, there wasn't as much combat in the game as Rise, so the chances of using all the fun tools in your arsenal was limited. The game's overall pacing felt a little off, as a result - like it outstayed its welcome.

Story, again, is not a strong suit of the Lara Croft games. They tried to do something interesting by having Lara feel bad for her actions at the start, but I don't think it really paid off.

Jank controls and weird pacing feel like a step back from Rise: 3/5 stars

You play superhero Lara Croft: a 20-something, mountain climbing, spelunking, martial artist, history expert who stealth archer kills her way through guys twice her size in picturesque, snow-covered Siberian wilderness and abandoned Soviet buildings in order to avenge her father. As someone who accomplished next to nothing in their 20s, this is like living the total opposite of my life.

The stealth combat is a fun way to get your power-fantasy fix, and if you end up fumbling your stealth run, there's a serviceable cover shooter to fall back upon. I didn't spend much ammo because the majority of my kills were done in stealth, and since you could craft arrows on the fly, there was never any risk of running out. Even during fights, I would prefer enemies to close the gap so I could counter their swing and one-hit-kill them.

I probably wouldn't have done as much exploration if it wasn't tied directly to Lara's skill tree and weapon upgrades, but since you get XP, resources, and special merchant currency when I find interactables on the map, you bet I was spending at least a third of my game time doing that between the main story and side missions.

The puzzles are more-or-less linear. I needed a hint in one or two of them, but for all the others, I basically just followed the fairly obvious path to the solution. The process was fun, though there were many moments where I had to remind myself that Lara is a superhero.

I could take or leave the story, and wasn't interested in any of Lara's descriptions of the artifacts she found. I have no desire to 100% the game or play new game+, however I enjoyed my first time through enough that it didn't feel like a waste.

Unique to the series is a co-op survival mode which is a fun diversion that adds more longevity to the game's life (as of writing, I needed to roll back to a previous version to work around serious connection issues).

Fun, but not a favourite: 4/5 stars.

Generation Zero's gameplay loop is fun with friends, which is exclusively how I played it. I wasn't very heavily invested in the story, but I liked having objective markers on the map to give our team a direction to point towards.

I would have given this game a positive review, however, the game crashes frequently in multiplayer. On my system, it would freeze and require a hard reset. Sometimes two or three times in a 3hr gaming session. This would have been bearable on its own, but due to the game's instability, the chance of it crashing during an autosave is high enough that it happened to me at least once... which corrupts the save and forces you to start a new character.

This single event ruined the game experience for me enough to caution others of the possibility.

That's the fastest I've ever hit New Game after a play-through!