My take on Rise of the Tomb Raider after the Gamescom demo

[Faelco]

Risthel said:

SvennoJ said:
The reboot wasn't bad but I quickly got tired of shooting people. Higher kill count doesn't make a better game. I'm hoping the bigger tombs are worth it as they were just 5 minute distractions in the reboot. I remember less of the reboot than of the first 2 games, so yes, forgettable.

The exploration in that footage looks linear and scripted and platforming looks very automatic like Uncharted. Maybe the puzzles begin where the footage ends at 10:46. Some huge deserted tombs to sink your teeth in, get lost for an hour trying to figure out the pieces of a huge interconnected puzzle. I'm still hoping that's in there somewhere.

That's what I've been saying, you can't call your game Tomb Raider without having exploration and puzzles. It's really the only thing that can make this game a bit different. The developers said that there are going to be more tombs, but if they are all scripted like this or a tiny room like in the prequel, meh... 

 

[Spoilers about the first TR in this post] 

 

I think (still not sure about it) that the real problem about the first game is that it is a 2 hours game turned into a 10~ hours game.

 

It's the same thing all game : you infiltrate a place, you have a few skirmishes, and you arrive at the center of the place, you have a cinematic, a huge gunfight, explosions, and Lara barely escape the burning place with a QTE (everything always burn and explode, even without any reason), falling into a new cave or forest where you begin the exact same thing. Village, temple, ship, temple again, fortress, always the same scenario. 

The gunfights are always exactly the same with only 4 different AI (shooting from afar with gun and explosives, rushing to close combat, coming at you with a rope, or the guys with shields... that's basically it), and always the same setup (same positions for the crates, ropes, everything). If you've seen one gunfight, you've seen them all, and you can know in advance any bad guy position and move when you enter the next room. 

 

Even the story is a 2 hours one! The bad guy kidnapped your friend and you go to save her and stop his ritual. That's it, the only twist is that you free her once and he get her back after. A few useless and almost unseen before sidekicks can even die in the process, and I don't think anyone cared about their (poorly done) deaths. No character development or anything like that, except for the fact that (the unbearable) Lara says "Oh my god, I killed someone, but I had no choice", and a few minutes later "Run for your life bastards, I'LL KILL YOU ALL!"....

 

That's what has been bothering me yesterday when I finished it. Once you've done the first few hours of the game, it's exactly the same gameplay, same plot, same situations for the rest of the game. The only thing left is the climbing simulator, also repetitive but at least pretty cool.

 

So a really decent game, but way too repetitive, too cringe worthy at times (the Bollywood reference is spot on!), and too much "I wanna be Uncharted but with a dark and serious tone" to be a good game. And not enough exploration, tombs (and too many gunfights) to be a Tomb Raider, of course. 

 

And you don't have cool boss fights anymore, the only "bosses" you have are boring "QTE fights" :(