Gamers review bomb Shadow of the Tomb Raider for going on sale

Shadow of the Tomb Raider is currently in the midst of a review carpet bombing. Early adopters of the final entry in Lara Croft’s reboot trilogy are currently unhappy that other people are getting the game cheaper than they paid for it.

Across PC and consoles, the game has seen a significant price reduction. While it launched at £44.99 on Steam, the game’s first sale saw a significant price cut to just under £30. There have been similar reductions on Xbox, too, with the Croft Edition recently dropping to the price of the Deluxe Edition. It’s a hefty slash off the asking price and it’s easy to see why fans may be annoyed, but it could be a sign that Shadow of the Tomb Raider isn’t doing particularly well.

Looking at Steam Charts, a site which tracks the concurrent players of every game on Steam, it shows that Shadow has only ever had a lifetime peak of 34,000 players. It’s predecessor’s all-time peak was 44,501. It may not seem like a large drop compared to 2015’s Rise of the Tomb Raider but 10,000 players equal 10,000 sales at £44.99 each. That’s a lot of dosh.

Many of the game’s new reviews aren’t exactly criticisms of the game itself. Instead, users have taken to explaining how they believe they’ve been ripped off by Square Enix.

Here’s a small handful of reviews that we found:

“This shows good things come to those who wait… Game is good btw…
But NEVER PRE ORDERING A SQUARE ENIX GAME EVER AGAIN. MY FIRST AND LAST SQUARE ENIX PREORDER.” – 23 hours on record.

“one month -34%!!! OMG” – 8.1 hours on record.

“Discount just one month after game release?” – 53.8 hours on record.

Reviews that were written before the game’s decline in price were mostly positive – although there is apparently an audio issue that is making some users refund. The sharp decline in positive reviews is 100% attributed to the sale of the game, but why do users feel this way?

Other games have seen larger price decreases than this in a similar amount of time. Volition’s Agents of Mayhem – a serviceable open world game – saw numerous price decreases not long after release. In fact, just looking at the game’s sale charts show that it has seen sales all the way down to just £5.39. Sales aren’t anything new.

For what it’s worth, we thought that Shadow of the Tomb Raider was a fine game. It’s a great game in a great series that, like its predecessors, has a few down points. It definitely isn’t worthy of such a critical blasting like this.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider is available to purchase on the Windows Store here.

Original Story: Kotaku