Right off the bat, I really appreciate that they're tried to have an actual Plot with Characters this time around whereas the last one was just a collection of people doing things until credits rolled. I'm not going to say that any of that narrative work they do here is really impressive but it was a big step up from TR2013.
One of my immediate impressions of this game was seeing how much they had expanded the crafting systems and feeling extremely exhausted. There's just so much stuff. Weapon upgrades and inventory upgrades and like eight types of ammo, and now there's like a dozen different crafting ingredients. The few times I had to seek out specific materials to craft a specific upgrade I wanted was truly miserable. Sometimes doing something simpler is better. Even if the crafting TR2013 was a bit light, I think I prefer that to whatever you want to call what they've done here.
I think it's interesting that instead of doing usual open world "climb a thing to reveal a bunch of icons" they do "find three different things to reveal everything." On the one hand, it's a good idea because it means I can find one map and then go grab those collectibles (or whatever) and it helps to make map clutter more manageable. But on the other hand, it means I was backtracking through places multiple times over which can be very tedious and annoying when it's the more scripted climbing sequences that the main story has you do.
And shoutouts to them for mostly fixing the platforming breaking and killing me. The vast majority of the game was totally fine until I got the finale and suddenly it was doing the same shit again, spinning the camera around right as I jump or Lara just randomly let go of things for no reason and, like, tripled my deathcount in twenty minutes.
I still feel largely ambivalent about the combat here. Shooting people is whatever. I like that they seemed to make stealth a more viable option (even though there's still a lot of forced combat encounters that don't let you stealth). And I do genuinely like doing the stealth in this game! It's very satisfying to do a Death From Above and be some Predator murder machine. That said, it does feel like they made the stealth for it to fail. The way it hides or obscures some information you'd need to be able to stealth through an encounter means that shootouts are nearly inevitable.
Speaking of combat, they expanded the skill tree a bunch and added a lot more skills for dodging and countering and doing finishers and, you know what? No thank you, I don't think I will. I will simply circle strafe around the enemies and dump bullets into them like a normal person.
There's this thing the game does whenever you come upon something that tells you about what people in the past believed about the world. You find artifacts and notes and such that talk about how people encountered something they didn't know how to explain and would turn to spiritualism to try and explain it. For example, late in the game, there is one of the puzzle tombs in a big cavern that a note says must obviously be a pathway to hell and Lara kind of laughs and points out that, no, it's just a big cavern. And then there are notes in the tomb from a woman who was set to be exorcized and she explains that she understands that she isn't possessed and just has Weird Brain Stuff going on but the people around here attribute it to demons. The writing around this stuff makes it feel like the game thinks this sort of thing is quaint? Like, "oh how cute of these centuries-old people try to explain things! But we know better now because we have science!" Which is a really strange attitude to have towards belief in the supernatural when your game has an immortal man and an undying army and a magic crystal in it!! Your game is extremely supernatural, just like the one that came before it!! Maybe don't be so dismissive towards actual beliefs people held when you're going to turn around and say "okay but here's some stuff we made up that is Totally Real and has no scientific explanation!" I think it's weird and kind of hacky writing.
'C' as a default keybind sucks ass, I hate using it and I don't know anyone who likes it. And putting something relatively important on it is bad. PC gaming is so cursed because there's so many options for keybinds and yet game devs love to make terrible choices around them.
Also, while I'm wrapping this up with minor complaints, it sucks that they tied weird bonuses to the outfits. I want to wear the cute outfits and instead I had to wear whatever had the best bonus available. I want to play dress-up, I do not want to have to think.
Overall solid improvement over the first game. Still a great 'no thoughts, head empty' collectathon game for me.
Edit: Realizing a day later that I didn't write anything about the actual story and I have some Thoughts about it so it's getting an addendum on the end. It's a MacGuffin chase as Lara tries to work through her feelings about her dad mixed with a really boring white savior narrative because golly those poor natives just don't know how to defend themselves anymore!! It kinda sucks and lot of the writing is vapid. They do so little to actually convince me that the magic crystal at the end is important for something and until the final cutscene it's not even clear why Lara wants other than "well, dad wanted to find it" so the ending feels like it comes out of nowhere. I think they could've had something with Lara dealing with her relationship to her father (he was never around and she resented him for that for a while, his mother died and he withheld lots of details around that, he was generally very closed off, and then he suddenly killed himself while she watched). It's the only really interesting thing going on here and they devote so little time to it. Hard to keep me interested in the narrative for large swathes of this. They could've at least thrown me a bone and let Lara kiss Sophia or something. The end (plus the Blood Ties DLC) sets up some interesting extended family and conspiracy stuff that I imagine will be what the third game is about so I'm mildly hopeful that there'll be something there but really I should probably lower my expectations.
One of my immediate impressions of this game was seeing how much they had expanded the crafting systems and feeling extremely exhausted. There's just so much stuff. Weapon upgrades and inventory upgrades and like eight types of ammo, and now there's like a dozen different crafting ingredients. The few times I had to seek out specific materials to craft a specific upgrade I wanted was truly miserable. Sometimes doing something simpler is better. Even if the crafting TR2013 was a bit light, I think I prefer that to whatever you want to call what they've done here.
I think it's interesting that instead of doing usual open world "climb a thing to reveal a bunch of icons" they do "find three different things to reveal everything." On the one hand, it's a good idea because it means I can find one map and then go grab those collectibles (or whatever) and it helps to make map clutter more manageable. But on the other hand, it means I was backtracking through places multiple times over which can be very tedious and annoying when it's the more scripted climbing sequences that the main story has you do.
And shoutouts to them for mostly fixing the platforming breaking and killing me. The vast majority of the game was totally fine until I got the finale and suddenly it was doing the same shit again, spinning the camera around right as I jump or Lara just randomly let go of things for no reason and, like, tripled my deathcount in twenty minutes.
I still feel largely ambivalent about the combat here. Shooting people is whatever. I like that they seemed to make stealth a more viable option (even though there's still a lot of forced combat encounters that don't let you stealth). And I do genuinely like doing the stealth in this game! It's very satisfying to do a Death From Above and be some Predator murder machine. That said, it does feel like they made the stealth for it to fail. The way it hides or obscures some information you'd need to be able to stealth through an encounter means that shootouts are nearly inevitable.
Speaking of combat, they expanded the skill tree a bunch and added a lot more skills for dodging and countering and doing finishers and, you know what? No thank you, I don't think I will. I will simply circle strafe around the enemies and dump bullets into them like a normal person.
There's this thing the game does whenever you come upon something that tells you about what people in the past believed about the world. You find artifacts and notes and such that talk about how people encountered something they didn't know how to explain and would turn to spiritualism to try and explain it. For example, late in the game, there is one of the puzzle tombs in a big cavern that a note says must obviously be a pathway to hell and Lara kind of laughs and points out that, no, it's just a big cavern. And then there are notes in the tomb from a woman who was set to be exorcized and she explains that she understands that she isn't possessed and just has Weird Brain Stuff going on but the people around here attribute it to demons. The writing around this stuff makes it feel like the game thinks this sort of thing is quaint? Like, "oh how cute of these centuries-old people try to explain things! But we know better now because we have science!" Which is a really strange attitude to have towards belief in the supernatural when your game has an immortal man and an undying army and a magic crystal in it!! Your game is extremely supernatural, just like the one that came before it!! Maybe don't be so dismissive towards actual beliefs people held when you're going to turn around and say "okay but here's some stuff we made up that is Totally Real and has no scientific explanation!" I think it's weird and kind of hacky writing.
'C' as a default keybind sucks ass, I hate using it and I don't know anyone who likes it. And putting something relatively important on it is bad. PC gaming is so cursed because there's so many options for keybinds and yet game devs love to make terrible choices around them.
Also, while I'm wrapping this up with minor complaints, it sucks that they tied weird bonuses to the outfits. I want to wear the cute outfits and instead I had to wear whatever had the best bonus available. I want to play dress-up, I do not want to have to think.
Overall solid improvement over the first game. Still a great 'no thoughts, head empty' collectathon game for me.
Edit: Realizing a day later that I didn't write anything about the actual story and I have some Thoughts about it so it's getting an addendum on the end. It's a MacGuffin chase as Lara tries to work through her feelings about her dad mixed with a really boring white savior narrative because golly those poor natives just don't know how to defend themselves anymore!! It kinda sucks and lot of the writing is vapid. They do so little to actually convince me that the magic crystal at the end is important for something and until the final cutscene it's not even clear why Lara wants other than "well, dad wanted to find it" so the ending feels like it comes out of nowhere. I think they could've had something with Lara dealing with her relationship to her father (he was never around and she resented him for that for a while, his mother died and he withheld lots of details around that, he was generally very closed off, and then he suddenly killed himself while she watched). It's the only really interesting thing going on here and they devote so little time to it. Hard to keep me interested in the narrative for large swathes of this. They could've at least thrown me a bone and let Lara kiss Sophia or something. The end (plus the Blood Ties DLC) sets up some interesting extended family and conspiracy stuff that I imagine will be what the third game is about so I'm mildly hopeful that there'll be something there but really I should probably lower my expectations.