I keep playing this but I don’t think it’s that good.
The levels are sort of fun to traverse sometimes. Some are pretty vertical! The puzzles in the tombs aren’t super hard or anything, but some are slightly satisfying.
Sometimes they force QTE sequences or combat on you. I don’t like either.
The story is dumb and bombastic. You’re fighting a an evil organization lead by a religious zealot and your stepmom.
It is beyond infuriating that the game’s story tells you from the very start that this is a side story to the “real” confrontation with Trinity. Like, show of hands, who on earth fucking cares? Why does this confrontation need to be built up to? Are they worried that this well is so shallow that all value in the Tomb Raider brand will evaporate as soon as they have a single resolution?
Tomb Raider 2 opened with a goddamn chinese dragon. You know what you did at the end of Tomb Raider 2? You killed that fucking chinese dragon.
Did Tomb Raider 3 bring back the dragon? Fuck No. It had a /different/ magic artifact, and a whole bunch of new assholes you had to shoot. And that all works because this shit is /trivial/ to write. It’s fucking disposable, and it needs to start acting like it.
The camerawork was certainly one of the best things of the previous tomb raider, but it wasn’t exactly a dynamic system. It was scripted for certain gameplay actions along your linear traversal, so it’s completely possible they didn’t put as much care in the new game as they did in the old one.
Ok, yeah, I can see that then. Sometimes there are nice shots when you squeeze through different obstacles or when something happens in the distance.
The problem with the scripted camera, though, is that Monster Hunter taught me to always touch the camera during every moment in a game, so when control of the camera gets taken away from me it feels really bad.
In the previous game all of the environment-appropriate clothes were paid DLC. You’d be shivering on a snowy mountain peak in a torn spaghetti-strap tank top, marching away from a pile of dead mean in heavy parkas, while the camera angled up on your posterior.
I hear @WinonaGhostRyder consulted on that one.
The entire franchise in general has suffered from a severe case of Too Fucking Serious. I hate to say it, but from what I can tell it’s Toby Gard’s fault.
The tombs in this game are really frustratingly short. They approach an neat idea, and then there’s exactly one puzzle with that idea and then the tomb is over.
That is exactly like previous New Raider. This is not inspiring confidence, actually it sounds exactly like more of the same with zero lessons learned.
I played a showroom demo of this and got to the same conclusion.
“More of the same, except we now had time to finish the crafting system properly”
The graphics still look great though.
I’ll get it when its dirt cheap like the other one. It worked pretty well as a low-effort adventurey game. And I like Lara’s appearance (never liked her previous character design, although in the Lara Croft games its pretty restrained)