Shadow of the Tomb Raider
Eidos Montréal · Puzzle, Action, Adventure
Overview
As Lara Croft races to save the world from a Maya apocalypse, she must become the Tomb Raider she is destined to be.
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In Shadow of the Tomb Raider Definitive Edition experience the final chapter of Lara’s origin as she is forged into the Tomb Raider she is destined to be. Combining the base game, all seven DLC challenge tombs, as well as all downloadable weapons, outfits, and skills, Shadow of the Tomb Raider Definitive Edition is the ultimate way to experience Lara’s defining moment.
Survive and Thrive In the Deadliest Place on Earth: Master an unforgiving jungle setting in order to survive. Explore underwater environments filled with crevasses and deep tunnel systems.
Become One With the Jungle: Outgunned and outnumbered, Lara must use the jungle to her advantage. Strike suddenly and disappear like a jaguar, use mud as camouflage, and instill fear in enemies to sow chaos.
Discover Dark and Brutal Tombs: Tombs are more terrifying than ever before, requiring advanced traversal techniques to reach them, and once inside they are filled with deadly puzzles.
Uncover Living History: Discover a hidden city and explore the biggest hub space ever found in a Tomb Raider game.
From the game's Steam store page.
THE GAMEQ VERDICT10,000 reviews analyzed
What players are actually saying
1. Summary
Players broadly like Shadow of the Tomb Raider and keep recommending it years after release. The praise centres on how the game looks and on what it does between story beats: dense Mesoamerican jungles and ruins, large challenge tombs and crypts, and a mud-and-foliage stealth system. Reviewers who talk about the Survivor trilogy tend to treat this as the closing chapter worth finishing, especially at the low prices it sells for, and some of the same reviews call it the weakest of the three while still recommending it.
The frustrations centre on pacing and polish. Among negative reviews, 28% describe bugs, glitches or soft-locks and 27% call the game boring, tedious or slow; complaints about the story and about cutscenes, forced walking and squeeze-through animations come up less often. The most detailed technical complaint concerns puzzles and physics interactions that break above 60 frames per second, which players say has gone unfixed for years and blocks the main story until they cap the frame rate. Opinion splits on the story, on the puzzles, and on the shift away from combat toward exploration. Both sides agree on the visuals: negative reviews bring them up as often as positive ones, usually to praise them.
2. What keeps coming up
What players praise
Visuals and the jungle settingHigh
In all, 22% of reviews mention the graphics, visuals or environments, and the share is the same among negative reviews as positive ones. Players describe the Peruvian jungle, the hidden city and the underwater sections as lush and detailed, and several say it still holds up as a showpiece years later. One recommender wrote that "The jungle feels wild and terrifying, the tombs are massive". Fans of Mesoamerican history praise the Maya, Aztec and Inca ruins, the lore attached to relics and the optional native-language voice mode.
Negative reviewers concede the point and then say the visuals are not enough, as in "Gorgeous visuals and not much else." A smaller group finds character faces, hair and lip sync weaker than in Rise of the Tomb Raider, or finds caves too dark to read.
Challenge tombs and cryptsMedium
Reviewers who praise the optional tombs call them the largest and hardest in the trilogy ("the best and hardest Tombs/Challenge Tombs in the series"), and some say the Definitive Edition's DLC tombs fit into the main game well. One positive review put the trade-off this way: the game "brings the trilogy to a close with its strongest tombs yet, though it never quite reaches the heights of its predecessors". Several negative reviewers also exempt the tombs from their criticism. A minority found specific tombs tedious or confusing to navigate, and some DLC tombs are tied to the save and bug complaints covered below.
Stealth, mud camouflage and the predator playstyleMedium
Praise for the combat centres on stealth: covering Lara in mud, hiding in vine walls and picking off guards. "The mud camouflage mechanic is an amazing addition," one recommender wrote. Some who like it say there is too little of it, among them a negative reviewer who said "the stealth is really fun and satisfying but you barely ever get to do it". Others report enemies detecting them through walls or the whole group being alerted after one silent kill, and heavily armoured late-game enemies that bows cannot drop quietly.
A fitting end to the trilogy, at a low priceMedium
Some recommendations come from players who just played the three Survivor games back to back and see this one as the necessary conclusion. Price comes up in reviews from players who bought it deeply discounted or in a trilogy bundle. "Got the whole trilogy for $7 and I feel like I committed robbery," one player wrote. Negative reviewers use price the other way, saying the game was not worth it even at a steep discount.
Runs well on modest hardware and Steam DeckLow
A recurring group of players reports smooth performance on older cards, Steam Deck and Linux, and some use the built-in benchmark as a hardware test. "Runs flawlessly on Steam Deck Oled," one wrote. These reports sit beside the crash reports below, which centre on DirectX 12, ray tracing and some AMD and Linux setups.
Where players are split
The story and the castHigh
More reviews praise the story than criticise it, though criticism dominates when negative reviewers bring it up. Some players call it the most emotional entry, focused on grief and Lara's family ("The story hits harder than I expected"). Critics call it predictable and a rerun of Rise's structure (find an artifact, lose it to Trinity, chase it), say it falls apart after the hidden city of Paititi, and find the ending rushed. One specific complaint is that Lara causes a catastrophe early on and then kills many people while showing little self-awareness, which reviewers found hard to like. Jonah draws strong reactions in both directions: some enjoy the friendship, while others write that "Jonah is really annoying" and say he exists to be rescued. Players using the native-language immersion mode note that Lara answers everyone in English.
PuzzlesMedium
Puzzle praise outweighs criticism, and some players describe the puzzles as better than in the previous two games ("really fun puzzles that make me think but aren't too difficult"). The other side says the solutions and even the climbable routes are poorly signposted, so they ended up on YouTube: "I had to google way too many solutions to puzzles." Part of this group discovered that the puzzle they were stuck on was actually bugged, which made them distrust every puzzle afterwards (see the frame-rate bug below).
Less combat, more explorationMedium
The game shifts weight from gunfights to climbing, swimming and tombs, and players split along their taste. One recommender summed up the balance as "Very few combat, but there's a lot of exploration and puzzles." Players who loved the firefights of the first two games say the combat they upgraded for never arrives: "Gives guns but barely any combat sequences". A related complaint is that skill trees and weapon upgrades feel pointless, especially when the story strips Lara's weapons several times: "You spend half of the game collecting resources to upgrade lots of weapons, but much of the time when you have to fight you "loose" your weapons just beforehand."
The hardest difficulty and its checkpointsLow
The difficulty system has fans: players appreciate being able to turn off white paint, survival-instinct hints and Lara's puzzle chatter separately. The complaints come from the top difficulty, Deadly Obsession, which saves only at campfires, and most of the reviews raising it come from players with 30 or more hours in the game. They report losing long stretches of progress to a single janky jump in the Cenote escape, the final mission or DLC tombs. "Not enough campfires for hardest difficulty," one wrote.
What frustrates players
Slow pacing, cutscenes and forced walkingHigh
Boredom with the pacing sits beside bugs as one of the two most common complaints in negative reviews, and some give it as their reason for not finishing. Reviewers describe the opening hours, the childhood flashback and the Paititi hub as long stretches of unskippable cutscenes, radio calls that force a slow walk, squeeze-through gaps and holding forward through scripted sequences. "It's like a bad movie where you sometimes have to press W." Reviewers point out that many cutscenes cannot be skipped, and a few say the skip prompt did nothing when they pressed it. Many in this group compare the game unfavourably with Rise of the Tomb Raider and Tomb Raider 2013, which they remember as better balanced.
Bugs that block progress, especially above 60 fpsHigh
Bugs appear in 10% of all reviews and in 28% of negative ones. The most detailed reports describe a frame-rate-dependent puzzle failure: at high frame rates the rotating pillars at Kuwaq Yaku, the Path of the Living mechanism, the oil puzzles and some grapple swings stop working, and the main story halts until the player enables V-Sync, caps the game at 60 fps or changes the monitor's refresh rate. "it sure is stupid how if you're sitting at 240 FPS the engine can't keep up even with V-Sync and causes half the puzzles and action sequences to bug out," one player wrote. Players stress that the fixes are buried in forum threads and that the bug dates back to release, and several had already passed Steam's refund window when they hit it, though a few ran into it within their first few hours.
Inconsistent climbing and grappleMedium
Climbing is a large share of the game, and a steady group of players says it is less reliable than in Rise: Lara misses ledges she should grab, jumps in the wrong direction or lets go of walls, and the rope swing and overhang mechanics fail. "Lara doesn't grab ledges, or just randomnly decides to jump off a platform," one reviewer wrote. Others say climbable surfaces blend into the scenery when white paint is turned off. A smaller group says the opposite and calls the climbing the smoothest of the trilogy.
Crashes, missing dialogue and lost savesMedium
Separate from the puzzle bug, players report crashes under DirectX 12 or ray tracing, a memory leak that slows the game over a long session, and "failed to load profile" errors that wipe progress. A distinct recurring bug makes all voice lines and subtitles vanish from cutscenes; the workaround players share is to switch the game's language in Steam and back again, sometimes on every launch: "Dialogue keeps dissappearing from cut scenes, had to switch languages to french and back to fix it". Linux and macOS players report their own crash and audio problems.
Side quests, collectibles and the hubMedium
This complaint leans toward players who stayed longest: about half of the reviews mentioning side quests, the hub or collectibles come from players with 30 or more hours. They describe Paititi's side quests as fetch errands with weak voice acting and say the collectible clutter dilutes the tombs, as in one review that describes "a hub world full of dull fetch quests and collectibles that only distract from the core stuff that's actually good". Other players enjoy hunting everything down.
Completion blockers and achievement bugsLow
Completionists warn others about bugs that make 100% impossible without restarting: the side-quest NPC Pisco the Dead turns invisible if players talk to people in the wrong order, some documents and collectibles do not register, and some areas cannot be revisited. "Fix the Pisco the dead glitch," one wrote.
Smaller irritantsLow
A handful of complaints recur without dominating: the story forces Lara into tribal outfits for long stretches ("Don't restrict my outfit choices"), Lara repeats the same hint lines during survival instinct, camera shake that cannot be fully disabled bothers players prone to motion sickness, and the keyboard-and-mouse controls feel awkward in some puzzles while some controllers lose input or vibrate constantly.
Data and launcher promptsLow
A few players object to a privacy notice and data-collection prompt shown at launch, or to errors from the Epic Online Services component in the Steam version. One wrote "When you launch the game it forces you to accept a predatory privacy notice".
3. The player conversation
The conversation is calm and mostly positive, and much of it runs through comparison: players weigh Shadow against Rise of the Tomb Raider and Tomb Raider 2013, and a familiar kind of review is a recommendation that still ranks it third of three, written by someone who finished the trilogy in one run. The share of positive reviews held in a narrow band across the years that make up most of this slice: 85% in 2023, 83% in 2024, 83% in 2025 and 82% in 2026. Some reviewers writing around the winter sales say they bought the game cheaply in a trilogy bundle.
Who raises what follows how far players got. The slow, cutscene-heavy opening is a recurring subject in the shortest-playtime negative reviews, and a few come from players who hit the frame-rate puzzle bug early and stopped there. The puzzle bug, missing dialogue and crashes are reported across the whole game, by players at every stage. The long-haul players, those with 30 or more hours, are the main source of complaints about the hub and side-quest bloat, completion bugs and the Deadly Obsession checkpoint problems. Exploration fans and action fans split over the reduced combat. Some negative reviews are reluctant, and several writers say they would have picked a middle option if Steam offered one.
4. What the developers could do
- Decouple puzzles and physics from the frame rate. Players at 120 to 240 fps hit pillars, wheels and grapple swings that do not work, and they had to find V-Sync or 60 fps workarounds in forum threads to finish the main story.
- Fix the vanishing dialogue and subtitles bug. Players report cutscenes with no voices or subtitles and a language-switch workaround they sometimes have to repeat on every launch.
- Make every cutscene skippable and trim forced walking and squeeze animations. Slow pacing is one of the two most common complaints in negative reviews and a frequent reason for quitting, and one player replaying on New Game+ found the unskippable scenes worse a second time.
- Make ledge grabs and grapple swings more forgiving. Reviewers describe dying to missed grabs and failed swings while doing the right input, which they say made climbing less reliable than in Rise.
- Stabilise DirectX 12 and ray tracing and protect save profiles. Crash reports, memory-leak slowdowns and "failed to load profile" errors that wipe progress recur, especially under DirectX 12, ray tracing and some AMD setups.
- Add checkpoints or restart points on Deadly Obsession in long sequences. Players with 30 or more hours describe losing large chunks of progress in the Cenote, the final mission and DLC tombs to a single bad jump.
- Fix the completion blockers. Completionists warn that Pisco the Dead turning invisible and uncounted documents force a full restart for 100%.
- Give players more freedom over outfits and Lara's hint lines. Players dislike forced tribal outfits in Paititi and Lara repeating the same puzzle hints, and both could be options.
