Rise of the Tomb Raider is so good y'all

I've just finished this game, and in the olden days I'd spend several hours writing reviews and getting footage together to discuss the various aspects of the game, but man this game is good.

I do have some complaints with it, however; but overall the game is a significant improvement over the first Tomb Raider. I preferred more of the open nature of the game in TR 2013, where you'd constantly run into obstacles and side areas you knew you needed an upgrade for, but didn't have yet, because when you got that upgrade you'd spend time running around collecting everything you had missed until that point.

This aspect still exists in ROTR, but it's significantly lessened, with only a handful of areas requiring your traversal tools. It's mostly used to gate the "optional" tombs, and then you'll use it during story missions to get from A to B. The majority of the time you'll end up exploring the world using the same base skills you've had since the beginning of the game, which makes it feel as if the game was originally as linear as it ended up being, and if you'd be able to get the upgrades out of order, or not at all. There are multiple times where I was crossing a path where I could use my wire axe to swing across, or I could drop down and just walk across the path normally, although a bit slower. It was just.. odd. It was as if the game was saying "well if you had this upgrade this would be much easier, but you don't so you need to do things the long, slow way", except you of course have the upgrade because of the progress you have to make in the story to reach that area.

The crafting and component system is much much better than it was before, with a variety of items needed to upgrade your weapons instead of generic nuts as a "resource currency". It feels more natural and incentivizes exploring and hunting as opposed to finding all the little crates scattered around the world and buying upgrades for your bow (which doesn't even really make sense.)

Tombs rewarding unique skills instead of weapon parts is very interesting, however I would've have enjoyed it if they included those as well in a tomb. As it stands, Tombs were a bit underwhelming, with many of them being a single easy puzzle to solve, while some were more complex and challenging (still roughly a single puzzle, however). It'd have been so much better if tombs ended up being multiple puzzles in one, instead of handing you the reward immediately after you figured out what you needed to do. "Oh, you shot your rope arrow into the thing. Okay, here you go, here's this skill so you can see animals hearts I guess." It was just .. odd. I enjoy having tombs, but man they really need to add more, or make them longer and more rewarding.

Combat was satisfying as usual, however a lot of the combat upgrades seemed.. unnecessary. The bow eventually gets an upgrade where you can zoom in and lock onto 3 targets at once, which will result in an automatic headshot, meaning you really have no reason to use any other weapon (except the shotgun later in the game when you unlock it) because it's just so good. Add on to that poison arrows which instantly kill all enemies regardless of armor, and stealth kill them at that, there's no reason to bother with the louder weapons.

I thoroughly enjoyed stealthily taking down enemies and clearing encounters without ever being seen, and the challenges in the game were interesting and fun little distractions, but ultimately I don't see myself going back for the "100%". The challenges are simple and relatively easy to find, being things like "cut this rope", or "shoot this thing", or "find these hidden stashes", but the reward for them is EXP, and I've already maxed out my skill trees. The coins you collect were initially a incredible idea, and I had dreamed up scenarios where I found locals who'd sell me unique weapons and items for the coins I'd collected, but in the end, you only have one place to spend your byzantine coins, and the upgrades are hardly worth mentioning; you get attachments for your equipment, access to two weapons, and a weapon upgrade tool (which you'll find naturally in the environment at later points) and its a bit.. underwhelming.

I had kept hoping that in later points of the game I'd find more things to spend the coins on, and more upgrades, but there were very little. The traversal tools themselves also felt a bit restricted, as you really didn't get a breadth of interesting new tools like you did in the original.

Overall, it felt like ROTR was a game that wasn't quite ready yet, that there was so much more meat they were prepared to put out on the bones and systems in place that hinted at a much deeper and grander world, but the realities of development and production cycles got in the way, and we ended up with a fantastic game, but a somewhat leaner experience than expected.

I believe this has in part to do with the "lacklustre" sales of the original game according to Square Enix, and part of it has to be due to the exclusivity deal with Microsoft, which apparently had been in place long before the current generation consoles had even launched.

I'm very interested in seeing what they manage to deliver in the future, as the changes made in this game (swimming underwater, for example) was interesting, and made the overall experience feel "better", it still feels just shy of nailing a truly exceptional mark. If there were more content, I definitely feel like this game would be contender for my GOTY, but as it stands, it's competing for #3 or so on my list.

A wonderful, fantastic game that I could not recommend enough, but not quite reaching what I believe its potential to be.