tomb raider
I played & beat it. it's a solid game, clearly designed to be playable and attractive to as many people as possible. it's not super gross like I thought.
I agree with pretty much everything you said in your video review. concerning the survival aspect, though: I agree it's not entirely successful and that they should have done something else with it, but I'm also glad it's not a major part of the gameplay. wilderness survival is some other game, tomb raider has its own thing going.
despite my earlier impressions of the new lara croft from the trailer and everything, I'm ok with the direction they took the character. I really don't like the idk, teen tv drama/lost/superhero movie look they gave her 3d model tho. there's too much effort going into making her outwardly the media archetype of an average girl. the direction they take the character in is fine, and as you said, they manage to make the transformation without making it seem like it was entirely involuntarily thrust upon her. she makes a ton of her own decisions.
my main issue is that it's too much of an action shooter game, too many 'epic' james bond spiderman action movie scenes. they're incorporated really really well into the gameplay, but there's too much effort creating this sort of experience every step of the way. same thing with the GRIT, too. they really wanted this game to be Gritty and Real, which is something that sets it apart from the original series. but there's just bodies and skulls and human pulp everywhere, and no one ever pays attention or acknowledges how friggin gross it is. I think this is a major failure in the design. take eg a game like amnesia where, when you finally actually see gross stuff, it's actually frightening and gross. it's almost like seeing it irl. but in this game you see roughly a hundred thousand corpses and it's not really gross because no one in the game seems to think it is. the bodies and skulls are just hanging out there like the ammo crates.
I think that's another thing this game's really missing out on, too: it's not very scary!! for all the elaborate detail and choreography put into the action thriller scenes, I'm not sure anything successfully brought out a feeling of fear in me. conversely parts of the original series were frightening as heck. I dunno, maybe it is partially the sorta obfuscation that goes along with the low-poly shapes and their low-detail textures, but that's not all of it. while exploring in the earlier games there was always a feeling of uncertainty and occasionally fear, and that really enhanced the experience of exploring ancient ruins. for example, in this game there's that one dark bunker with high grass and ruined junk or whatever. the 90s tomb raider version would be scary as heck, because you don't know what weird low-poly creature could be lurking beyond your field of view or in the grass, what kind of trap you might spring etc. in this game the worst possible scenario is it'll spawn a swarm of noisy badguys that you can hide from and shoot just like the last 200 ppl you killed.
the game also really misses some of the sense of exploration and progression, and the sort of cryptoarchaeology/cryptozoology/supernatural uh WONDER. this I guess was the main draw of the earlier games before the invention of spacechat, exploring a bunch of different locations and gigantic tombs.
I enjoyed it, though! in this form it actually kind of reminds me a little of NOLF, which I guess can only be a good thing. I also see comparisons to that Chronicles of Riddick game that some people were crazy about, but I've never played
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