I remember LOVING Rise of the Tomb Raider when I first played it. I went for 100% straight away, and the DLC ended up being the icing on the cake - a bunch of new modes, great extra content for the main game, genuinely a fantastic example of DLC done right. I picked the trilogy up as soon as it came out on GOG, and got to playing it. TR2013 was still great, and I 100% completed it. Rise turned out to be much buggier than I remember - Lara will often ignore ledges and ropes when jumping, causing unnecessary deaths. I've clipped through walls, had the camera zoom in and stop functioning, had a "press F to attack" prompt stuck on the screen until I restarted... None of this happened when I last played the game (on Steam). Maybe I got lucky in my last playthrough, but this definitely tarnished my experience replaying it. Other than that, the game is still great. It takes the foundation from TR2013 and builds on it, improving virtually everything. There's a bigger emphasis on exploration, survival, and crafting this time around, and all of it works great. There's proper side quests with meaningful rewards, which is a huge step up over the first game. Combat is improved, with more stealth options, the ability to craft traps and bombs on the fly, as well as more enemy variety with the addition of more hostile wildlife. Set pieces are as impressive as ever, puzzles are better, but tombs still suffer from mostly being single rooms with no real evolution on the initial ideas shown off. Weapon variety is marginally better - you've still got the same 4 weapons, but each slot has different types available, such as handguns including revolvers and semi-automatic pistols. Upgrades apply to all weapons of a specific type, thankfully, and there's a few that are unique to each type - upgrades for magazines wouldn't make much sense on revolvers, after all! The story's much better presented, but it's not exactly the most memorable. It's not what you're here for, though - the exploration, combat, stealth, and puzzles are all mostly excellent. If you liked Tomb Raider 2013, you'll love Rise. And Shadow's pretty good too! Well worth it for the absolute steal of a price at 90% off (at time of writing). I'd have given it five stars if not for how often I ran into obnoxious (but not game-breaking) bugs. Once or twice here and there isn't too bad, but the frequency of the issues I was having was really off-putting.
I loved the reboot trilogy when they first came out (despite some Denuvo-related issues with Shadow of the Tomb Raider at launch preventing me from playing it til they removed it), and the whole trilogy being launched on GOG felt like a great opportunity for a replay. I always remember Rise/Shadow being significantly better than Tomb Raider 2013, but after replaying it, I found it held up pretty well. It's a fairly bog standard third person shooter with a heavy emphasis on platforming and exploration, and some light stealth elements. Enemy variety is pretty lacklustre - it's mostly humans with a few wolves here and there - but it's chock full of bombastic set pieces. The inspiration it took from Uncharted (which itself took inspiration from the original Tomb Raider games) is plain to see, and that's not a bad thing. Movement and shooting feels pretty good, and there's a nice variety of puzzles and platforming challenges to overcome. Precise platforming can be a bit janky here and there, with Lara deciding to not reach out and grab platforms from time to time, but it doesn't happen often enough to be a huge problem. The optional tombs are all single room puzzles, and it feels like they could've done more with the mechanics they introduce. That's got to be my biggest complaint - I wish they had a bit more to them than just a single puzzle and you're done. As for performance, it runs very well, though the menus could use some work when using keyboard and mouse. Speaking of which, it's one of those PC ports that didn't take KB+M into consideration for button prompts, and instead of showing the key you need to press for QTEs (of which there are a lot), it shows weird icons like a hand or an exclamation mark. I failed a bunch of QTEs early on because I had no idea what the icons meant. I managed 100% completion in about 15 hours. It's mostly collectibles and upgrades and is relatively easy to go for. Overall it's a great game, and I had a blast playing it!
Did you 100% the original Hollow Knight on Steel Soul mode? Was it easy for you? Then Silksong will give you the challenge you've been looking for. If you struggled to beat the first game, Silksong will be the most frustrating experience you'll ever have in the Metroidvania genre. Right out of the gate, Silksong pulls no punches. There's a joke going round that Hollow Knight was the tutorial for Silksong, and you'd better believe it. Even early game bosses are tougher than anything the original game threw at you. My biggest issue with the game is you start with 5 masks (health) and bosses do 2 masks of damage - even on contact with them. You heal for 3, if you can manage to do enough damage to be able to heal, but from max health you die in 3 hits. This makes that first health upgrade feel worthless, as you'd still die in 3 hits if you can't do enough damage and get another heal off. This is Silksong's progression in a nutshell. It gives you plenty of tools, but upgrades are hard to come by and don't feel impactful. By the time you have a weapon upgrade, the enemies you're facing are tougher, so you won't feel a difference. It doesn't feel satisfying, and coupled with the brutal difficulty, the game feels more frustrating than anything. I've rolled credits on this game twice, and the extra stuff it wants you to do to get the "true" ending is ridiculous. It feels like the game was made to be hard for the sake of being hard, rather than providing a satisfying challenge. It demands mastery of its mechanics to finish the game, let alone complete it. That or dumb luck, which is what the majority of boss fights felt like for me. If you're a hardcore Hollow Knight fan and want a massive challenge, this is for you. If you're more of a casual gamer, give it a miss, for your own sanity's sake.
