Been playing Shadow of the Tomb Raider. If you enjoyed the previous two games, you'll probably like this one. I do like that they're trending more toward a platforming puzzler with some combat as opposed to the frankly absurd amount of shooting in the previous games.
It was just laughable when this 100 pound college girl mercilessly slaughtered a legion of mercenaries in the first few games, and it's thankfully toned down in this one. I've probably played the game ten hours or so now and I've probably spent about twenty minutes in combat. The focus has moved to puzzle/platforming, and I think that's a great thing.
I also like that you can adjust the difficulty of three individual aspects of the game, platforming, combat, and puzzles. Lets me crank the puzzle difficulty up to hard (and basically ultra since I've been playing it high af) but keep the combat at medium so I can play with a controller without throwing that controller across the room. Although I've spent so little time in combat that it really hasn't mattered much.
Main thing I wish they'd do is improve the stealth. It's there, but it works about as well as the old Assassin's Creed games, where any minor fuck-up alerts every guard in the world to your exact location. I feel like this series would be perfect if they got the stealth right. Lara is the type of character who should win fights via stealth and outsmarting her enemies rather than sheer combat prowess, and I think the gameplay needs to shift more to reflect that.
Pretty much every segment with enemy soldiers goes exactly the same: you pick off anywhere from two to five guys stealthily before you make a tiny mistake and then you just mercilessly mow the enemy soldiers down with your guns. It's not very exciting, and the best parts of the game are not the fights, but the tombs.
The tombs have become the key focus of the game. Not only do you find a bunch of them randomly in the game world, but many of them are woven into the main quest and the side quests. Since I cranked up my difficulty, I get no hints, which makes them some really fun puzzles. They're rarely frustrating, either. I've had a few that really made me think (probably not helped by me playing high), but I've always figured out the solution on my own and it has generally made sense once I figured out how everything works. My only real complaint is that, in some of the linear segments of these puzzles, it can occasionally not be very clear where you're supposed to go next. Probably should have just left platforming on easy so white paint marked all the platforming spots.
Anyway, fun game. Now that football is over, gonna go play it some more.
