I have finally gotten around to playing the game. It has been sitting in my backlog for the past 5 years, so yes, I'm a bit behind on current games. Nevertheless, I've been making my way through the game and it has been somewhat enjoyable. At least the first half of the game was, the second half just feels like the game drags on and on and on......
Having seen the Tomb Raider movie (which I would classify as a B movie) the start of the game had a familiarity to it; on the ship, bad weather, ship breaks apart, the story and action set in.
Controls are decent enough to make most of the game easy enough to navigate. However, there are some spots where traversing the climbable rock faces was problematic if you were not in the correct spot, even though the rock face is wide open and it looks like you should be able to move left/right or up/down. A few spots where you need to jump and grab a ledge or rock face, sometimes the game never grabbed and you fell to your death.
Combat controls are pretty straight forward. Left MB shoots, Right MB aims and Middle MB does secondary actions - such as shooting your rope arrow once you acquire it. There was no aim assist that I noticed, but things weren't difficult in any shape or form, it is almost impossible to die during combat. If you take a hit or two, simply find cover to regain your health. The only times I found myself dying was if I didn't take full notice of my surroundings and I had an explosive barrel near me, close enough to kill me if the bad guys blew it up. Combat is very easy, even on hard difficulty. Most guys can't hit you and you can generally stand in the open (near cover, just in case) and take your time to do full powered up arrow shots with your bow. There are even a couple of instances where a leg trap snares me and drags up, leaving me hanging upside down. I can hang, upside down, never have to reload my pistol and shoot every guy in the head that's coming for me. You'll also get spots where guys use ropes as zip lines; they come racing down the rope, land on the ground and for some reason they run really, really slow - like they're trying to move through molasses. You get a lot of time to easily shoot them before they get close to you. You can dodge arrow shots (if you're paying attention) and melee attacks like you're Neo from the Matrix. With proper level and skills learned you can learn how to counter melee attacks, inevitably making you nearly invincible.
A lot of the game time is plagued with QTE (Quick Time Events). You're watching as things happen, but you have little to no control over the outcome. Sometimes you just watch as Lara is swept down stream in the river or falls from something. Other times you're trying to escape a situation and for example, a bad guy grabs you, you then have to mash the left/right movement keys or press the F key at the right time...if you don't, you die and start the QTE over. The QTE are pretty basic and a lot of them could outright have been removed from the game.....then again, if some were removed, they would have had to make the game a bit more closer to an open world. A lot of paths you take, it's a liner path and you can't deviate too far or come at your objective from multiple angles.
You come across "optional tombs" that you can't miss if you wanted to. You'll receive a notification chime when you're close. At first I thought they would be fun, entertaining to traverse, but I was mistaken. 3 of the optional tombs I've come across there is just one basic puzzle to do and you get the treasure - you'll spend 5-10 minutes in these optional tombs after you got the treasure, trying to figure out if it really was that easy or if you completely missed something. I spent more time looking around the tombs trying to find more to them than I did solving the simple puzzle in them.
The graphics still look good for a game that's over 5 years old and is hardly taxing by any means on a current PC. I've running my i5-4670k @ 4.4GHz, 980Ti AMP! Omega (clocks pushed an extra 100MHz) and running the game across 5760x1080 resolution. Everything maxed, my GPU barely breaks a sweat and I hold 58-60 FPS.
The game is too easy. I have lost interest in the story because it keeps getting dragged out. Find your colleagues and something happens along the way. You escape, you find 1 colleague, they easily make it to some other part of the island and wait for you while you seek out others. On your way something happens, you find a colleague, maybe get captured or colleague dies. You move on. You find others, they easily make it through the island without you to some other random part and now you have to go through swarms of bad guys, zip line ropes, climbing, falling, QTEs just to reach the same location your colleagues are at and they're unscathed.
I started to tally up how many times you fall into some river or shaft and need to slide from left to right or magically whip out your shotgun to shoot a debris wall before you hit it.....and how many times something falls out beneath you and you tumble down and down and bounce off everything except the kitchen sink and then you get up and keep going without breaking a bone.....I got tired of trying to keep track of how many times that happens in the game.
I understand that this is just a game, but they tried really hard to invoke emotions and get the player to connect on an emotional level that all the nasty falls and "miracle" survivals Lara has, it's impossible to become emotionally invested in the game. You fall and take shots like the Terminator, but keep on going. You can pretty much John Wick your way through a small army or shoot the crap out of everything with your bow like you're Hawkeye (or Green Arrow....or maybe Rambo, if you're not keen on being like Hawkeye). Ammo is plentiful and even if you were by some chance low on ammo, that's okay, if you have skills unlocked for close combat, you should be able to survive most encounters.
In the end, the simplicity of the gameplay (especially combat) and the predictable story line has made the game feel boring around the halfway mark. I've still got about 15% of the game left to complete, but right now it feels more like a chore. I've stopped taking interest in the diaries you find and I stopped trying to locate the GPS devices scattered in the levels. I'm pretty much just forcing myself to finish the game because I've already invested a solid 8 hours into the game and I'm close to adding it to my "Games Beat" list.
If you want a game that tries to tug at your heart strings, lacks the creative puzzles the original Tomb Raider had, has easy combat, pretty graphics and decent enough controls, this game won't let you down. If you're looking for a challenge and a good predecessor to the original Tomb Raider - this isn't it.
If you wanted something closer to the original Tomb Raider, I'd strongly recommend Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light. The Guardian of Light is even co-op so you can play with a friend.