If you enjoyed the other games in the Survivor Trilogy, you’ll feel right at home in Shadow of the Tomb Raider. By taking inspiration from older games in the series, Shadow exceeds 2013 and Rise with its amazing setting to explore and a more capable & confident Lara Croft. However, it is severely dragged down by a lacking story and major pacing issues.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider goes on sale regularly and is well worth the discounted price.

Shadow’s main setting, the Jungles of Peru, is by far its biggest strength. It's so rich with detail, with tons of animals scurrying around the lush foliage. Paired with amazing ambience sounds and an energetic soundtrack, Peru is one of the best locations to explore in the series.

The tombs in Shadow are another home run, each one contains an in depth puzzle, often wrapped in an exciting central theme. I particularly enjoyed the over the top spectacle of the DLC tombs, but the Cenote tomb was a personal favourite. There's still a variety of collectables beyond tombs, all of which enhance Lara’s abilities and make the jungle so exciting to navigate.

While it's a shame there's almost no new traversal upgrades, having all of your equipment early keeps environments open and encourages heading off the main path at your own leisure.

The one drawback of Shadow’s environments are its populated areas. These areas, while incredibly detailed, just aren’t as interesting to explore, and place annoying limitations on your weapons and outfits. Missions in these areas often involve a lot of wooden dialogue, and are never as captivating as exploring abandoned ruins.

Unfortunately, most elements of Shadow’s story are underwhelming. Lara begins her adventure searching for “the box that can remake the world,” a vague Macguffin that lacks emotional investment. A horrible burden is placed on Lara, which the game fails to thoroughly explore, resulting in some bizarre whiplash that ruins the game's pivotal story scenes.

Our villain, Dr. Dominguez has very little time to develop an antagonistic relationship with Lara, and barely feels connected to the Trinity from the last game. The allies fare slightly better, but Lara and Dominguez’s relationships with the hidden city feel too simplistic. The DLC’s do a decent job fleshing these relationships out, but it's still not nearly enough to feel compelling.

The silver lining is Lara, who finally feels like the iconic Tomb Raider. It's great to see her solving riddles and courageously facing down villains. The game also gives Jonah time to shine and explores his friendship with Lara which I loved, as he is one of the strongest aspects of the Survivor games.

The thorough outfit and weapon customisation for Lara is great, it gives the player a personal flair and matches her equipment to the jungle setting. With such focus on Lara’s power, the gruesome death animations of the Survivor games are more dehumanising than ever. Doubling down on exploiting Lara’s pain for shock value definitely should’ve been avoided.

Shadow’s combat is surprisingly infrequent. This is great for fans who want to focus on the exploration and puzzles, but it's quite strange just how few fights there are, when most of the collectables involve upgrading Lara's arsenal and abilities.

Maybe Lara should’ve only had her bow for this adventure. There are several sections where you lose your firearms, or fight enemies that only have bows. There’s a clear focus on Lara’s stealth and craftiness that could’ve been pushed so much further.

When you do get the chance to fight, it feels pretty good! It’s very similar to the previous survivor games, but the new skills and ammo provide just enough exciting ways to take on enemies. The best all out gun fights are found in the DLC missions, although I would suggest avoiding the DLC guns, they are quite overpowered.

The best new feature is the enhanced stealth, Lara can now hide in foliage and cover herself in mud. It gives combat this “jungle predator” theme, which is a whole other flavour of fun, although the AI is far too easy to fool. I love how Lara feels like a tactical badass, but not quite the full on action hero she will soon become.

In Tomb Raider, I generally prefer the environments & Lara of the PS2 titles, but the gameplay loop of the survivor games. Shadow of the Tomb Raider, is a very good bridge between these two trilogies. Despite its many failings, it left me quite excited for the series’ future.

Final Fantasy XVI deviates heavily from previous games by embracing a low fantasy setting & real time action combat. Both are mostly relatively unexplored territory for the series and have been quite divisive. There's plenty to love in the gameplay and story, but there are a lot of broader design decisions that hold the game back from being one of the series’ best.

FF16 is worth full price, although your mileage may vary. The DLCs aren’t essential, you might be better off waiting for a sale.

Combat both looks and feels great. Clive cleaves through enemies swiftly, and chains awesome magical abilities together effortlessly. The ever growing arsenal of abilities makes the combat so fun and varied. Every eikon brings a new style of play, and the build variety that comes from mixing various abilities together is incredible. You’re bound to find something that suits you, but I loved being able to change my powers as much as I wanted.

The best battles in the game are undoubtedly against the monolithic eikons. Although their gameplay is more simplified, the spectacle of taking on these elemental giants is so captivating. Their tremendous visuals and breathtaking music are perfect climaxes to story arcs, I just wish there were a few more of these battles.

Normal bosses are still very fun, particularly against dominants that turn the arena into a frenzy of hazardous spells. The giant monsters were also cool, although these battles would occasionally feel like repetitive punching bags, especially in sidequests.

Despite my endless praise, FF16’s combat is frustratingly simple. Clive has all these cool abilities, but most enemies pressure the player or use smart tactics, they cannot counter an offensive player. With hard mode locked behind a second playthrough, the lack of enemy variety becomes such a burden in the latter half of the game, making normal battles tedious when you aren’t testing out new powers.

FF16’s visual beauty isn’t just in combat, but also its gorgeous environments. Every level is filled with details as you see a variety of rich locales across Valisthea. The loading screen renditions of the major cities are just so stunning, and the amazing soundtrack brings these locations to life while perfectly reflecting the story's tone.

I just wish more of these locations were freely explorable, you spend brief moments in these beautiful cities only to be whisked away into combat hallways far too quickly. The actual open areas are quite barren in comparison. The game dissuades exploration in general, There are no secrets or useful items to find and the settlements you do explore are quite small, and don’t contain much aside from merchants and sidequests.

The RPG elements are also annoyingly restrictive. Gear progression is so uninteresting and straightforward that it may as well not be there. Side quests, while sometimes expanding the story in interesting ways, mostly feel like unenjoyable fetch quests or checkbox tasks that aren’t unique or memorable.

These are baffling choices, and where FF16 clearly fails to live up to the series the most. While mechanics such as the ability system can partially substitute for gear, there is a notable lack of RPG feel as FF16 juggles being an Action game and an RPG, failing to fulfil the expectations of either.

Like many aspects of FF16, the main narrative diverges heavily from series traditions, but that doesn’t stop it from being incredibly captivating. The story is carried by our protagonist., Clive is one of the series’ best leads, the strong focus on one main character results in a fully fleshed out main hero, and Ben Starr’s stern but emotional performance is legendary.

The supporting characters, major and minor, are all highly memorable and develop enjoyable relationships with Clive. There are a couple major characters that unfortunately feel very undeveloped and end up being thorns in the story that should’ve been expanded further

The main narrative is quite intriguing and I liked how it twisted and developed. In series tradition, it starts getting unnecessarily complicated in the last third or so, and sometimes characters commit to big decisions or beat you over the head with simplistic messaging (did you slavery is bad?), but it's still an enjoyable and exciting journey.

I love the focus on political drama, the world is so thoroughly fleshed out with details on every major faction. I was enveloped in reading about Valisthea’s history, but the ability to bring up relevant information mid cutscene is a revolutionary feature that stops the player from getting lost, and should be in every big RPG like this.

The crucial flaw of FF16’s story which bleeds into its gameplay, is its horrendous pacing. Much like FF14, the story will build up to a climactic moment, the follow with far too much down time. This wasn’t great in an MMO but it's terrible here, the story will slow to a halt after major moments and often take far too long to pick back up, sometimes even forcing you to do tedious side quests.

As a result this game is simply far too long, and even the great combat begins to wear thin in the games final hours. You could easily chop a fair chunk of this story out or retool it heavily for a tighter adventure, but the game's notoriously slow pacing makes me hesitant to ever do a full story mode replay.

The DLCs suffer heavily from only being accessible after completing almost all of the main story and a large chunk of side quests. The game has truly run out of steam at this point, and the DLCs are too similar to the base game to counter this issue.

Echoes of the Fallen is a short dungeon wrapping in a dull story that fails to innovate on the base game. However, the gear is significantly more interesting and the final boss is one of the games best (and most challenging!).

The Rising Tide is a much stronger package. It houses new locations, boss fights, sidequests, an eikon power and more! Mysidia is one of the most beautiful locations in an already beautiful game and the story was quite good. Still, I wouldn’t say this is an essential purchase that completes the game, it's just a nice cherry on top.

FF16 is a good action game and a GREAT Final Fantasy and it's well worth playing if you’re a fan of the genre, or the series. While I do hope future titles borrow from the older games more, the unique strengths of FF16 are so great that they outweigh its flaws, even if those flaws are many.