I'm on a Rebootstravaganza. I liked DMC a lot, and so far Tomb Raider is turning out pretty good. It's also turning out pretty fucking brutal and a little disturbing. A lot of the stuff that raised eyebrows in the trailer happens very early on and was probably just there to get people talking, but that just means it's concentrated. Lara falls on what looks to be a piece of rebar and impales herself, pulls it out, and proceeds to see what kind of horrible filthy environments she can roll around in.
It's got the Arkham Asylum style clothing degradation but it does it to Lara herself as well. I'm about a quarter of the way through the game and if this shit keeps up she's gonna be a skeleton by the end. I'm not buying the whole prequel thing, it'd be strange and a little offputting to have this seriously dark experience turn Lara into the Boob Adventurer who goes to Atlantis and fights dinosaurs.
Combat's surprisingly fun, especially the melee. There's no karate here, Lara actually fights like someone just trying to survive. Lots of frantic ducking and smacking people in the forehead with rocks off the ground.
Biggest flaw right now is something I see with a lot of similar games, the puzzles are sort of, I dunno, gamey? It's like, you solve the puzzles almost on autopilot, lighting white cloth on fire and using your rope arrows on objects wrapped up in white rope until the puzzle is solved. If you don't think about it it's fine, but when you look at the big picture none of what you just did makes any kind of intuitive sense. It's not something anyone would ever think to do. I like my puzzles to take thought, for one, and I like them to take intuitive thought, things someone might actually do to accomplish a goal in real life. If I were to, for some reason, find a tomb that was up where I couldn't reach it, I just wouldn't go to that tomb. When Lara finds a tomb she can't reach, she sets a forest on fire and the trees just happen to fall in a way that allows her to climb up a crashed plane to reach the tomb.
One of these days Lara's gonna collapse a building and when the cops bring her in all she'll be able to say is "I dunno, I saw some damaged wooden beams and figured they wouldn't be there if I wasn't supposed to break them"