As Square promised, the first BIG trailer for Shadow of the Tomb Raider landed today! It contains no gameplay footage, but it establishes the theme and hints at what the game will generally be like when we get it this fall.
This video doesn’t subvert many expectations. We guessed this game would be closing out Square’s current Tomb Raider trilogy. We figured it would be darker than the previous two games because that’s usually how it goes (see Tomb Raider Underworld). We even knew the title something like two years ago (thanks to a leak).
What the trailer DOES give us that’s new is something we feared we’d never see again — moments of Lara dominating a fight and kicking serious ass! It’s such a delight to see these Thuggee warriors (or whoever they are) look around and have no idea what’s going on while Lara leaps around the shadows like a ninja, dispatching them one by one. It feels like coming home. How I missed her competence.
This lasts up until she stops an Aztec priest from sacrificing a helpless captive — then she throws her dagger away and thinks “what have I become?” A Tomb Raider, that’s what. Frankly I’m getting sick of these games apologizing for themselves. It’s a darned video game, it’s nowhere close to real life, and this goes double for Tomb Raider where everything is supposed to be over the top and crazy and escapist and FUN.
Nobody panic about the abundance of XBox logos and solitary appearance of the XBox One boxart at the end. This game IS coming to Playstation 4 on the same day — September 14. PC too.
