Yeah, good point – I guess it’s not terribly different from survival instinct Q view. Still have mixed feelings about that and I do rely on it way too much. Lara also basically narrates you through the solutions to all the puzzles, if you look at the target object she’ll say “I need some way to… {do the thing you need to do}”
Oh, man, I’m sorry you’re a racist. I haven’t played that yet but I plan to eventually since it made so many best game of the year and all time best RPG evarrr lists.
@miasm I play with keyboard/mouse though sometimes I think controller would be better. Not for aiming, but I headshot everyone near-effortlessly so it’s kind of pointless, maybe a handicap would be a good thing.
The combat in this game is weird. First time I ever died in combat was just now. They sprinkle so many ambient cans and liquor and smoke bombs and explosive barrels around the area that you have a comical number of options for taking out any bad guys. Not to mention explosive arrows, fire arrows, poison arrows, and so on. Plus your four weapon slots: bow, pistol, rifle, shotgun. The smg and rifle are kind of plink-y, but that shotgun is a monster.
I hate the way after a big battle they immediately rush to cutscene before I can loot the bodies. And then the 10+ guys you just killed are magically gone. I need those springs for upgrades, damn you!!
Stealth is workable, lots of bushes and climbing vantage points, though it’s hard to tell how visible you are without some kind of visibility indicator. I guess there’s an indicator over guys’ heads that changes, and they’ll say “hey let me check out that noise”. But I’m so wussy at stealth that the minute anyone sees me, I’m like to hell with all this save point retry stuff, kill 'em all and let god sort 'em out. Plus: the body looting!
I remember how little combat there was in early Tomb Raiders, it was almost exclusively exploring with brief punctuation of combat at key points. There was certainly no weapon choice other than the signature two pistols, either. Here there’s a ton of combat that gives you options, for sure, but just isn’t all that interesting compared to the exploration.
Speaking of exploration, that rope grapple / wire reel is bad ass. Now Lara feels as nimble as you’d want her to be. It all makes me wonder if an open world Tomb Raider with a ton more exploration and findable stuff, more of a “Far Cry meets Lara Croft” vibe, would be a better fit than this story and combat corridor stuff. Yeah. I think it would.
Do you know how humiliating it is to have my shadows set to “high” instead of “very high” at 4k? You can’t even begin to understand the way I suffer. You, sir, are a very insensitive person and I have been triggered by your callous words.
Looks like new quests open up when you return to previously visited areas. Not just animals, but new bad guy humans to hunt as well.
Got the rebreather (swimming, groan – though it seems there is only one “depth” to swimming which is really odd, you can’t control vertical) and the arrow climb ability. I still say this would be a better game if it took a page from the Far Cry 3 / 4 / Primal school of design and had open worlds with lots of places to explore. Hell, the animal and crafting stuff here feels ripped directly out of Far Cry.
Save your gold coins, so you can buy the enhancement tool that unlocks the last tier of weapon upgrades. I just bought that, and the laser sight for the rifle.
When I went home that snowy night I cooked myself a steak. Then I drunk half a bottle of whiskey, tried to make snow-shoes out of tennis rackets and fell asleep with the cat. I was so damn happy.
I can’t decide if that was horrible, or the best dialogue of the game.
annnnnnd… scene (well, I don’t want to spoil the ending for anyone reading this!)
I liked the game. It was very, very combat heavy and could have toned that down quite a bit in favor of more exploration. Metacritic sez 86. I’d go with between 8 because good lord soooo much combat. But it makes a satisfying part 2 of the origin story started in Tomb Raider, and I want to see where they go from here. Hopefully toward more open worlds, mix in a bit more of the tried and true open world Far Cry formula.
I think this topic illustrates that many of the people who debate at length on the “see, look how gaming is super sexist” topics haven’t played many (or any) of the referenced games. And they probably wouldn’t even if you drove to their house, bought them a console and the game, booted up the game and placed the controller in their hands.
There is no shortage of puerile T&A in gaming (and movies, and books, and tv…), to be sure, but I get mega frustrated with, for example, “this is how sexist video games are, it is literally impossible to see batman’s butt!” being blindly accepted as true when you can boot up the latest Batman game and be face deep in bat-ass within 3 minutes.
Meh, that seems a bit confirming your previously stated bias.
I can’t blame anyone for not wanting to play or talk about this particular game, because it wasn’t particularly good. Sure, it had stellar graphical tech, but that can’t help poor level design, poor puzzle design, poor dialogue, poor plot, etc. The final showdown with the chopper was ridiculous, and the cliched bad guy not being dead cliche made me groan.
Sure, we got into this to talk about how the Tomb Raider series has gotten better at gender representation and gender issues in the series, and to the extent that Rise of the Tomb Raider didn’t contain the rapey scene it’s, I guess, less problematic than the 2013 reboot. But, RotTR is less of everything, less fun, less scenic, less original, less memorable.
I’m kinda avoiding this thread for just now because spoilers but will be back next week with some more lengthy write ups. No screens shots though, my rig would embarrass me against such previously shown riches.
I’d say I’d give it a 7.5 myself. Sooo much combat. So much.
My bias? Makeup? Flares? Ponytail?
I guess what really grinds me gears about this is that someone will show a static screenshot of the flare on Laras belt, then tsk loudly about the failure of feminism in gaming because the flare is clearly there to highlight her “assets”. Never mind that this static screenshot doesn’t represent actual gameplay, there are a ton of places where the flare is held in hand as you’d expect, the placement on the belt happens when she needs both hands free, she drops it on the ground when entering brightly lit areas…
But that’ll be blindly accepted as truth, because, who can bother to play the game and see beyond the narrative implied by some provocative text next to screenshot. Cue sad head shake. No. That would take, y’know, a few hours of gameplay.
At least a movie is the same exact experience for every viewer, every time they watch. Games don’t work that way.
Interesting horror vs. adventure angle, but, all that combat…
There’s so much gratifying gunplay/archery, now with fancy upgrades that would make Sam Fisher proud. Once you’ve resigned yourself to the fact that this may as well be a Call of Duty game for all the balls-out combat,
