Rise of the Tomb Raider

[PZ]

Did anyone ever get this game? My son just started playing it and reported that it is much like Uncharted 4, which is one of the few games that I have replayed in the past several years.

[fragger]

No, but I have played every Tomb Raider game before this one (which is the most recent one), but I lost enthusiasm for the franchise with the preceding game, which was just called Tomb Raider and told the story of how a young Lara Croft became - well, the tomb-raiding Lara Croft of renown. It was a very good game, well voice-acted with a very-much evolved, motion-captured Lara and was quite immersive, and I actually did enjoy it to an extent, but unfortunately one of the things that always attracted me to TR games - the puzzle-solving aspect - had largely been done away with in favour of straight-out actioning, almost all gunfighting with practically no puzzling. When I say puzzles, I mean having to laterally think things out as opposed to just trying to find a way through what are essentially multi-level mazes. Some of the puzzles in earlier TR titles were quite clever and rewarding when you cracked them.

From what I've seen of the Rise Of game, it looked to be much the same deal as the last one. And knowing how you feel about boss fights PZ, I know you won't enjoy those when they pop up periodically I never did. In fact, that was why I never quite finished the previous TR game - I just knew that some sort of final big boss battle was looming and I lost interest at that point.

I've toyed with the idea of getting Rise Of as Lara has come a long way as a fleshed-out character instead of just an animated avatar you guide around (she has come a long way graphically as well), and it's a fun change to play a deft female protagonist instead of the usual tough-talking male knuckle-dragger, but I'm still on the fence about this title. I may let the bargain bin sway me on it.

EDIT: I wrote the above before I looked at the link you posted PZ, and it appears that the devs may have addressed the dearth of puzzling that marred the last game for me, so my interest in it went up a notch

[PZ]

Bosses would kill it for me fragger 

However, I read in one of the articles about something called "non-combat story mode" which sounded to me like you are able to do puzzles and the like without much of the combat (I was hoping a loss of bosses)

[Dweller_Benthos]

I never played it but watched a series on youtube. The player was a big TR fan from way back and is greatly disappointed in the new "reboots". They are essentially open world combat games, with some light adventuring on the side. On the few occasions where you'd actually solve a puzzle in a tomb, he'd say sarcastically, "Imagine that, raiding an actual tomb in a Tomb Raider game." They looked great, had decent physics and all that, but as far as the old Tomb Raider stuff goes, not so much.

[Art Blade]

I watched a playthrough of the first "reboot" and thought it was at times ridiculous and the boss fights and QTE elements made me think, "good that I don't have to play that myself."

[PZ]

Thanks for the info gents 

[fragger]

I might still have a go at it one day if the price comes down enough. It's still going for 60 bucks at Steam, more than I'm willing to pay at present.