Crystal Dynamics already made a reboot of sorts with their Legend trilogy, but then decided to have another go with another reboot trilogy. "Rise Of The Tomb Raider" is the second game in this new trilogy, and sees Lara heading to Siberia in search for the Secret of Immortality. Her Father was looking for this, but was thought to have gone insane attempting to find it. There's a group called Trinity that is competing with you to find it, with some involvement by Lara's Father's ex-partner, Anna.
The action set-pieces have been toned down, and same with the Quick Time Events. Lara therefore isn't thrown around as much or put in as many deadly situations. There's still lots of action and perilous scenarios, but it's not as relentless. The first game had brilliant pacing and was very much like a thrilling action film. Due to the toning down of the action set-pieces, the game's pacing is slower, and it's less memorable.
The horror aspect doesn't feature, so there's no creepy cult, and you won't see many grim areas filled with rotting carcasses and skulls. You could say they added that via the "Baba Yaga" DLC, which has some hallucination sequences. Although that DLC started interesting, the Boss battle uses a sequence of actions that seemed a bit too easy to execute.
The main game opens with Lara and Jonah climbing a mountain in Siberia. If you have played the previous game, you won't be surprised to know there's an avalanche and lots of dramatic platforming action to survive. There's a flashback to Syria, where Lara survives a car crash which got shot up by a helicopter. After raiding a tomb, soldiers swoop in. Lara hides inside a coffin, even though the soldiers could probably see her. They cautiously open the tomb to hopefully find an artefact, but they find Lara - but for some reason don't shoot. No one notices Lara stealing a detonator and still don't shoot her when she is obviously going to detonate it.
Now in the Croft manor, Lara is going to get attacked but she somehow reacts even though she wouldn't expect anyone other than Jonah to be inside. After a fight, the attacker is about to flee with a book, but since Lara shouts "stop", he obeys for some reason. But then when he is obviously going to make a dash to the window, Lara hesitates and he ploughs through the glass. Even though Lara could just go up the window and shoot him, she decides to accept that the book is stolen.
The game then returns to the present day, where Lara is now on her own in Siberia. It follows some similarities to the previous game where Lara is cold and hungry, so need to find food and shelter. This time, this idea has more emphasis since the animal skins are used in crafting. These are required to obtain for the capacity (pouches/backpacks) upgrades (in the previous game, capacity upgrades was just a perk, bought with your upgrade points). The animals are mainly confined to a couple of areas which are similar to Hub areas with a few side-quests.
The salvaging idea is something that happens throughout, and is influenced by the recent trend in gaming. So you will be looting soldiers' bodies, crates, and other objects which gives you crafting materials and a bit of XP. Campsites act as save points, quick travel points, and the place where you craft and spend your upgrade points on perks. There are many upgrades that increase your crafting options, damage, accuracy, reload speed, alternative fire, and counters/finishing moves.
Some of your abilities (explosive cans, Molotov, poison clouds) are fun early on if you unlock them, but soon become obsolete when it seems easier just to quickly gun your opponents down, and the stealth situations become less frequent.
You gain new weapons across the game at story points; bow, pistol, shotgun, rifle, - all of which have upgrades and also a few variations you can switch between.
Sometimes the combat is based on close-range stealth kills, ranged stealth with your bow, or cover based shooting like Gears of War which can end up with long firefights. When Lara gets injured in combat, you can quickly create a healing item to instantly restore your health. This replaces the regenerating health mechanic from the first game.
Lara automatically moves into stealth mode, so sometimes it gives away the fact that there are upcoming enemies, because I saw her react before I saw or heard any nearby person. You can sneak behind enemies and strangle them, or take them down from afar with the bow. If enemies see a fallen enemy, see you, or hear you, then they, and nearby enemies will actively engage you. You can't just hide to make them return to a default state like many stealth games. Combat is often about popping in and out of cover, and that's how most enemies will engage you. Some are more melee focussed and will try and flank you. Many have grenades to force you to move to another location. Many forms of cover can also be destroyed by gunfire or burned, which also forces you to change position. I'm not sure if I was better at combat this time because I played the previous game recently, but the combat did feel easier and not as intense.
Lara is efficient with the bow or guns, but the way she dodges is a "scramble" which is a less elegant form of fleeing, almost on all fours, and great for moving between cover. There's no acrobatic flip like in the previous series of games. Some upgrades allow you to counter after scrambling, like throwing dirt to stun, or following up with a close attack with the axe or gun.
It's always beneficial to look out for the classic exploding barrels which can quickly dispatch groups of enemies. Otherwise try and go for a trusty headshot. You can incapacitate enemies by shooting them in the legs, which allows you to perform brutal finishers if you are close to them.
The end of the game feels quite similar to the previous where you infiltrate a building where you see many powerful, mythical enemies preparing for battle. When the battle happens, you seem to take on these trained warriors with ease.
Siberia is portrayed like an open-world with fast travel points. However, unless you want to 100% the game, there is no real need to fast travel, and the game can be played in a very linear fashion.
There's loads of crates to find, then more unique relics, and diary entries. The artefacts you find shows off Lara's knowledge of archaeology/history. The sheer number of collectables slows down the pacing, and seems to be more worthwhile to spam your "Survival Instinct" which highlights nearby points of interest and objectives. It feels more like a Ubisoft game with all the collectables.
The Survival Instinct also can show traps which is a rarely used mechanic in the game - it's almost like they forgot about that idea. When a trap does activate, the game goes in slow motion to allow you to jump out of the way.
There are certain objects with text which levels up Lara's appropriate language skill. All this really means is that there's a few objects you may find, but need to come back to later in the game to actually get the XP. For the most part, I could read it straight away anyway. It's pretty pointless really.
The "hidden tombs" are more common, and often larger in scale. These are where you find the majority of puzzles. There are no enemies in these tombs which allows you to focus on the puzzles. The puzzles mainly rely on physics, so you might be weighing down a ramp/elevator, or spinning structures. I found some of these aren't as obvious what to do, or might be slightly janky in execution. I found myself staring around wondering what the hell I was supposed to do. There were a few times I looked at a walkthrough video, only to find the player react the same way I did. The annoying thing is when you use your Survival Instinct, Lara likes giving you a clue, but you only really used it just to highlight which objects you can actually interact with. Since the areas are larger, it can be troublesome finding the way out (I think I ended up wasting 20 minutes getting out of the mine because none of the branching paths looked like the obvious way out). If you do come across the campfire, it's often beneficial to quick-travel out.
There's lots of climbing around which is like the usual Prince of Persia style stuff such as shimmying, jumping off poles etc. The jumping animation seems a bit more floaty, yet there's loads of jumps you think you should make but won't. I found it was really easy to jump to your death because if you hold a direction and jump, she will do it, even if there is no platform in sight.
There's some swimming sections which I found annoying, but they are short and infrequent. She can barely hold her breath unlike the Lara of old, and the game uses lots of blurring and lighting effects so it's hard to see where you are supposed to go. You generally just move forward though.
Throughout the game, Lara will acquire gadgets (knife, ropes, rock climbing axe, shotgun, and grenade launcher) that will be useful to access new areas or previous areas that can't be reached before. When you find the rope, Lara can fire it with her bow. You can only fire it at other roped objects (don't ask me how that works, it just does), and then you use this to pull objects, or rappel. Torches are now replaced with Lara's glowstick which she automatically pulls out in dark areas.
There are costumes: some are cosmetic, and some give you bonuses. Some are available once you have completed the main story including Lara's model from the original games which is hilarious to use.
The "Blood Ties" DLC in the Croft Manor has some interesting easter eggs like finding Winston's diary entry where he tells the story of mischievous Lara locking him in the walk-in freezer. The problem with this DLC is that it is purely finding items and listening to audio logs. The aim is to work out combination to a safe.
There's "Loot boxes" which you can buy with some in-game credits (maybe real money too) which give you cards for the endurance mode.
When I think of the most exciting battles and locales, I keep thinking of situations from the first game. With this game, the pacing is slower, it lacks the atmosphere, there's fewer action set-pieces, combat feels less interesting, and puzzles don't seem as good. It's a decent enough game and is obviously reusing many mechanics of the first game, but it loses its originality and the tweaks haven't made the game better.