Is this worth some pocket change in a steam sale?
Absolutely, the environment are stunning, the Uncharted/Indiana Jones feel makes for a fun 15hr playthrough and I was honestly taken aback by how effortlessly the semi-open spaces veer off in interesting ways to reveal tombs, crypts and collectibles that rewarded my curiosity. By the time you've realised the story is sub-par at best, you'll be far in enough that the above is enough to keep you going.

Is this a GOOD game?
No, not really. The story starts strong, setting up interesting themes and Lara as a more hardened version of herself with interesting character threads of narcissism and honest to god psychopathy being set up. But past the first act everything falls apart narratively and it impacts the game as a whole. The whole 2nd act just removes any intrigue and flow from the plot in favour of making Lara this almost 'pick me' nicey nicey girl who becomes besties with every native she meets, in complete contrast to what's been set up as a survivor who's matured into a destructive force that burns what she touches, and forces this truly awful indigenous tribe subplot down your throat. The conclusion is so half-baked and Disney-esque that despite the spectacle of the final 30 minutes I couldn't see it through constantly rolling eyes.

The runtime is another issue. I explored quite a lot during the game and rolled credits in about 15hrs. It took me maybe another 5hrs to reach 100%, about 8-10 hrs to clear all the DLCs (which range from absolute drivel to genuinely great tombs with some of the strongest story scenes in the game), and at 97/99 achievements unlocked I of course had to hit up the final 2 achievements on a hardest difficulty speed-run. It's here you realise that, skipping cutscenes, there's about 5hrs of gameplay, of which 20 mins is walking behind talking NPCs, and 4.5hrs is climbing sections.

But the main issue is the developers clearly listened to feedback that the previous instalments were arguably too combat and stealth heavy. So they removed combat and stealth. I'm not joking. There's maybe 7 combat/stealth encounters in the whole game and half of those are sword-wielding natives against an invulnerable white girl with an M16 and daddy issues. Combat is as a result a point and click game. There's more BOWS in the game than combat encounters. All progression - from looting boxes to killing all 27 enemies in the game, to raiding tombs - feeds in to making Lara a more perfect killing machine, but by the time the next combat encounter comes around how am I supposed to remember that 3hrs ago I unlocked the ability to craft some mushrooms that let me take more shotgun rounds to the chest?

So for the main 90% of the game you fight not enemies, but Lara's paranoid schizophrenia when you tell her to grab a ledge and she instead throws herself off a cliff face, reaching for a cloud that I can only assume she thought was a handhold since, to be fair to her, clouds do look very similar to the white paint these natives clearly have coming out their asses with how liberally they throw gallons of the stuff on the story-critical climbing spots.

I was a big fan of the 2013 reboot and indifferent towards Rise, but Shadow actively baffles with progression and extrinsic reward for the admittedly great exploration being tied to systems that are present in the game for a maximum of 20 minutes.

I'm more bemused than actively annoyed at the game, and I'm still looking forward to the 2 new games on the horizon, but if this cost me any more than the £3.30 I paid for it, I'd start to feel mugged off, with anything over a fiver feeling like someone with a cold had spat in my coffee. It's easily the weakest of the reboot trilogy and I'll have forgotten it completely (other than Lara's multiple undiagnosed personality disorders and apparent love for playing dress-up with Peruvian natives' clothing) in a few weeks. It's a recommend but SO barely. A 6/10 at best and even then, only when you've got nothing else to play and remember this game exists.

Why yes, sexy menu android lady asking me to complete a survey halfway through the game, I would consider having a relationship with an android. *clears throat* Why do you ask?

I recommend The Last of Us 2, but it’s a very shaky recommendation.

It’s difficult to talk critically about the game as a whole without touching on spoilers. A good story can survive being spoiled but here I think the narrative is so weak that having anything spoiled detracts from the already weak narrative package. So there’s no spoilers here, besides unavoidably discussing the structure and pacing.
Regarding graphics and performance, the game looks stunning. Think RDR2 but with a more hand-crafted level of detail and crispness to it. It’s often a painting made real. For me, I had more bugs than with TLOU, but the overall performance was more solid.

Gameplay:
The overall gameplay is largely the same core as The Last of Us 1, which I enjoyed. It’s simple but the ‘cat and mouse’ stealth and combat gameplay loop works well. Here however we’ve ditched the puzzles for the most part and rely more heavily on quantity of enemies and larger combat arenas. This is both a blessing and a curse.

At its strongest, TLOU2 has the labyrinthian open arenas with enemies aplenty for you to sneak through, jump from tall grass, fire off a shot or two, and sprint back into the shadows. The only thing you’re missing to make you a fully-fledged Viet Cong is that you can’t speak Vietnamese. It’s a difficult, compelling loop where you feel like an apex predator but also needs to keep your wits about you. Enemies flank intelligently and punish staying static behind the same piece of cover. It’s all particularly heightened by the brilliant difficulty sliders on offer. You can tweak numerous aspects of the game to increase or decrease aspects of difficulty. I played on grounded difficulty with resource scarcity dropped down to hard so I wouldn’t be punished as heavily for breaking stealth. You can tweak enemy AI, damage taken and received, how much your companions will help out. More games need to think about offering something like this.

On the other hand, at its weakest, TLOU2’s gameplay is open arena after open arena where you have to brutally murder 50 people to advance 100 feet. The lack of any other meaningful gameplay pacing mechanism can make this exhausting in all the wrong ways rather than tense and engaging as it feels like it should be. This is compounded by the fact the structure and length of the narrative (which we’ll get to) is so long and meandering that this loop wears thin. Additionally, the infected encounters generally felt a bit more phoned in an infrequent for me than in TLOU, which had a stronger balance of human enemies one fight, infected the next and vice versa. Here, you’ll spend the bulk of your time fighting humans.

Narrative:
No spoilers here (or at least light spoilers as to structure and pacing) but the overall plot of this game is so shallow. It’s so shallow that you roll your eyes expecting the writers to shove a very obvious message down your throat but that moment doesn’t come. This ends up feeling even more insulting at the end, as the payoff is so miniscule that it feels like a prototype AI trying to make an A24 movie: it’s just off and neither the journey nor the end felt of any consequence. So much of what made TLOU’s story engaging and genuinely emotional is gone here. This is a horrible world full of horrible people making genuinely moronic decisions. The story relies too heavily on these moronic decisions and shock value to try to propel itself forward and it just heightens that sense that stuff is happening, but there’s no overarching plot or character arcs to justify that stuff happening.

The biggest issue narratively is pacing. This game is far too long and does not know how to end or how it wants to end. There’s a section that begins approx. half-way through the plot which completely shifts the story and goes on for far too long. What makes this worse is the main plot is so disjointed that this shift in narrative comes at approximately 90% of the way through the plot and destroys the sense of urgency it’s been building to.

The individual moments that make up the plot as a whole are all expertly crafted and acted, and genuinely gorgeous, but they aren’t knitted together by the writers in respect of character or even a boring and generic but satisfying plot.

We end with whimper of an ending that has nothing of any value to say. Perhaps that’s the point and I’m being too literal. To be clear, a story doesn’t need to say something about the world, otherwise our storytelling ability would have peaked with Aesop’s Fables, but the story here doesn’t do anything else with regard to character arcs. In comparison, TLOU had a simplistic but masterfully executed plot that crescendoed with a beautiful exploration of character in that a certain character’s actions were different from how someone else might act, but the journey they’d been on had fundamentally changed their character and the choices they made in those moments were the only ones their character could make; you understood, and their was, at the surface level, no ‘deeper meaning’ to glean. TLOU2 didn’t need some deeper thematic meaning, but it didn’t even achieve the fundamentals of a story, let alone a good one.

It's not just the shift in narrative focus that kills the pacing and my patience, it’s the overall placement of scenes. Why are you showing me these 10 minutes of flashbacks in the final 5% of the game’s runtime, when having them being the first few cutscenes I watched would’ve heightened certain moments in the story? All else I’ll say for fear of spoiling anything is, how many games do you know that have introduced a ‘Chronological Mode’ to their story? I can’t think of any. But there’s the option here and it feels like a direct result of justified structural complaints levelled at it.

In conclusion TLOU2 is gorgeous. It’s brutal. Its core gameplay is an improvement on TLOU but design changes undermine the stellar level design and tense ‘cat and mouse’ act it typically masters. The narrative on the other hand is at best, a mess, and at worst, appallingly shallow and irredeemably cynical, having 80% of the cast lack any level of common sense, and either having your character destroy or form bonds with other characters in non-sensical and sudden ways. The story failures weren’t catastrophic to my enjoyment of the game, but whereas I left TLOU feeling emotional and pensive, here I felt the game was designed with The Last Jedi as an inspiration; like with that movie, here my expectations were subverted because I expected a well-executed story, not a far too long depiction of how horrible a fictional world is and how shallow and idiotic the people that inhabit it are. This wouldn’t necessarily be an issue in another franchise but the narrative is so core to the DNA of the first game that it feels like a rug-pull to anyone who enjoyed the first for story and character reasons. This, combined with the fact that the story design affects gameplay and my options for engaging with the levels you’ve crafted for me are what truly transform this from ‘the story isn’t that great’ to ‘have you played TLOU2? Man that story… Ass’.
I sound down on this game and I am, but it’s still worth experiencing. It’s unique, for better or worse, and both familiar and a refinement. It’s gorgeous but bleak. Occasionally heartfelt but more often an eye-roll at my character behaving like a toddler with a loaded M1 Garand. I hope this game and its now infamous reception doesn’t kill the possibility of a third because despite my criticisms, I haven’t played cat and mouse gameplay as visceral and tense as it, and if anything, this game proves there’s stories to tell from the most unexpected (and boring, and basic, and shallow) characters and places in this world they’ve crafted.

If you're curious whether everything negative people say about the 'RPG' AC games is true, like I was, let me save you 80+ hours and confirm it's all true. For context, I never leave reviews. If you like a game, cool. Hate it? Cool. But I just do not understand how this game is sitting so highly rated.

I have never, NEVER, played a game so completely filled with and predicated on repetitive, mindless slop content. Every. Single. Quest is 'mistios, I've run out of toilet paper, please kill the bandits that took it' or, even worse, 'sprint around in a 100m radius circle to collect 5 leaves, I've been waiting weeks for a hero like you to come along and help'. Every quest objective is ever so slightly far away as well to feel like a complete chore to get there. This isn't just the case for the hundreds of side quests, but the main quest as well.

Speaking of the main quest, I'd heard positive things and sadly I think those people singing the game's praises were playing a different game. To be clear there are sections of the main story I enjoyed, sections with genuinely rewarding emotional payoffs, genuinely impressive motion capture helping sell tragedy in some moments, and some great voice acting by Kassandra's voice actor. However most of what you'll be doing feels ancillary, unimportant and a complete waste of time in a game already bloated with slop content. Worst of all, I'd heard the payoff was worth it but the story just sort of... ends? The modern day aspects are also by far the worst aspects, full of characters I had genuine disdain for and, again, zero payoff.

The gameplay itself, depite the 'RPG' mechanics, is a basic and brain-dead as it's ever been in this franchise. Parkour is the biggest culprit with near enough no depth and the abilities to completely negate fall damage 10 hours into the game, and completely scale 95% of surfaces without any thought as to your path from the opening minutes of the game. Combat is animation driven slop with an incredibly low skill-ceiling and a reliance on long 'super-power' abilities that I'd honestly um and ah over whether to use. On the one hand the fight (and my misery) might end sooner, but on the other the 15 second combat animation might mean I'd be better off button mashing. If you insist on playing this game I implore you, gear yourself towards a high crit chance and crit damage build that can one-shot enemies and turn the difficulty down to easy, you'll be done a good few hours sooner.

The game is also this awkward hodge-podge of all the worst ideas from other games. Did you love the inane map-marker driven nonsense in the witcher 3? Did you also feel that while the witcher 3 was a masterpiece in some regards, the combat was a weaker aspect of the package? Good news, we've got thousands of cut and paste map markers and the combat is worse than in the witcher. Did you like the nemesis system in the LOTR Shadow franchise? Then you'll love this completely gutted, characterless mercenary system blatant copy of it. It even takes genuinely good aspects of previous games in the franchise and makes them inexplicably worse. How is the naval combat in Black Flag SO much more enjoyable, versatile and well-executed than a game by the same developers, released 4 or 5 years after it?

My final vent is the length and the DLCs. At this stage I'm about halfway through the Fate of Atlantis. Throughout my 85ish hours with the game I've been debating whether my thoughts are it's bad game or just a mindless game that's not for me. I was thinking the latter held true but this game is so intent on showing more and more hours of pointlessness down my throat that I simply can't picture anyone who'd enjoy the content on offer stretched over this length. Genuinely, I want to meet them, the same way I'd be interested to discuss with a serial killer why they are the way they are so I can just understand how their brain works more than anything. I thought approx 7.5hrs ago that I was finally coming to end with this game but had the awful realisation this final DLC looked a little large. So I googled. 15 hours long. I'm trying. Seriously, I'm trying to get through it. But the negatives of the main game are even sharper here with even less payoff. I think I might have to give up on this torture, I'm getting more enjoyment writing about how you should please, please avoid this slop than actually pushing through the final 5 hours to at least mentally tick this game off and parcel it away in my library to never touch again.

HOWEVER, it's not all bad. The game looks gorgeous. The sync point towers provide from some great screenshot opportunities across varied and genuinely gorgeous biomes. It feels like a success in being an 'odyssey' in this respect. It runs surprisingly well as well. I've got a strong rig but I was genuinely surprised to see I could push 1440p ultrawide at 100fps (with dips to 80ish in city areas). Additionally, there was a period of about 10hrs where I just roamed the Aegean, landing on new islands, completing quest chains and indiscriminately stabbing my way through Greece. This felt like the game I imagined it could be. Well put together, contained, gorgeous, a genuine sense of discovery. Were all these positive worth the slog of the remainder of the game though? No. Not even slightly. This game is a case study in how to create a gorgeous, soulless time sink that has no regard for the intelligence or time of players and I'm genuinely baffled as to how this half-baked RPG nonsense the franchise has turned to hasn't completely killed this tired franchise that I (for better or worse) spent so much time with as a kid.

By all means give it a go, but if you aren't hooked within 2hrs, please please refund this. It doesn't get better, it just gets longer.