The game expands on what I liked, but really didn't do much else on what was bad about the predecessor.
There are now much more exploration and puzzles. Platforming now even has rappelling, adding another dimention to already relatively varied climbing sections.
However, combat is still the same, and it being even less than before means that the game is rather inconsistent in its pacing. As someone who generally prefer exploration over combat in the series, it is a good thing, but the fact that it really hasn't improved anything is a missed opportunity.
Story-wise, it's probably the most interesting of the reboot series. It's one of the very few Indiana-Jones-inspired stories that directly tackle the questions of destructive fantasies of Western imperialist archaeology, yet it doesn't address it properly either (similar to how the first reboot tried to address the "mass-murdering hero archetype" and really couldn't do anything proper with it). There are some nice twists to the cliche, but they are incidental and does not necessarily address the larger issue.
Perhaps the most revealing (and unintentional) example of this failure is the immersion dubbing feature. The game has a feature to turn on culture-correct dubbing for all the local and non-main characters, but when Lara speaks to them, she answers in English. These locals then understand perfectly to continue the conversation--this creates bizarre situations where a citizen of a hidden city speaking in Yucatec understanding Lara's posh English without any problem. It's laughable at best and downright immersion breaking at worst. But it also points to the deeper problem the game has, which is that despite all the things it tries, it really never attempts to break free of the Western gaze; every story of this type from the West is guilty of this, but it's just more pronounced in Shadow of the Tomb Raider simply because it tries to address it.
There are now much more exploration and puzzles. Platforming now even has rappelling, adding another dimention to already relatively varied climbing sections.
However, combat is still the same, and it being even less than before means that the game is rather inconsistent in its pacing. As someone who generally prefer exploration over combat in the series, it is a good thing, but the fact that it really hasn't improved anything is a missed opportunity.
Story-wise, it's probably the most interesting of the reboot series. It's one of the very few Indiana-Jones-inspired stories that directly tackle the questions of destructive fantasies of Western imperialist archaeology, yet it doesn't address it properly either (similar to how the first reboot tried to address the "mass-murdering hero archetype" and really couldn't do anything proper with it). There are some nice twists to the cliche, but they are incidental and does not necessarily address the larger issue.
Perhaps the most revealing (and unintentional) example of this failure is the immersion dubbing feature. The game has a feature to turn on culture-correct dubbing for all the local and non-main characters, but when Lara speaks to them, she answers in English. These locals then understand perfectly to continue the conversation--this creates bizarre situations where a citizen of a hidden city speaking in Yucatec understanding Lara's posh English without any problem. It's laughable at best and downright immersion breaking at worst. But it also points to the deeper problem the game has, which is that despite all the things it tries, it really never attempts to break free of the Western gaze; every story of this type from the West is guilty of this, but it's just more pronounced in Shadow of the Tomb Raider simply because it tries to address it.