Shadow of the Tomb Raider: The Grand Caiman Review

"Fire Rises"

Campaign

April 3, 2019 at 4:16am

Shadow of the Tomb Raider: The Grand Caiman is the sixth DLC released for the game that continues the adventures of Lara Croft's latest release. This is rather weak entry and one that is certainly shorter than we’re used to. It’s a straight adrenaline run that’s concluded with a very poor tight area of conflict. This ending section was awkward, and seemed slightly out of place. That aside, this is a fast paced mission where you’re dealing with lots of fire within tightened spots. It’s not very challenging, perhaps confusing at times.

I liked the general layout and what they were going for, the execution just wasn’t quite there. There’s literally no extra story to this aside from a two second chat to kick start things. It doesn’t matter at all in terms of the overall narrative and it honestly felt rather pointless. By the end, I wasn’t sure what this did for me in terms of the story or the game’s enjoyment. I was sort of just done, then left the game.

The Conclusion

Shadow of the Tomb Raider: The Grand Caiman is a weaker expansion upon the core campaign that doesn’t matter in the overall narrative. It’s so weird to get some exciting recent tombs with the DLC releases that carry important story and then get what feels like a rushed addition. The area was neat, but they should have added some story to at least explain what was going on. There’s basically bad people, go take a look Lara.

That’s all the direction there is and you dive head first into a dangerous fire landscape. Why regular people would venture down there to pray to gods is beyond me. I don’t think anyone would even survive the trek. I didn’t find this one challenging, somewhat more confusing in what it wanted. It seemed to be about speed as you’d run by fire or climb by it. Hopefully things peak up again as I believe this was the shortest run yet for one of these extras and it literally had zero story to it. I don’t see the point in regards to how this was beneficial to the game.

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Shadow of the Tomb Raider Review on Xbox One X
Review Code Provided by Square Enix

Rating Overall: 5.8