An enjoyable experience. Some of the puzzles stumped me and had to pause for a while and think it through. The combat and stealth is as refined as it gets; though late game it feels like the enemies shred me too quickly and stealth is full of one-shot//chain kills. Story wise it feels like Lara has not grown much here and the villain is bland, not to mention that they air-dropped the Trinity Council and killed offscreen which is a wasted opportunity for dialouge between Lara and the main bad guys.
A good time, though take care that the camera often does have a mind of its own and gets in the way when doing dodge rolls into finishers with enemies right up in your face. The action never really stops but Lara 'keeps losing' whether that's being hurt multiple times in horrible ways, or friends getting killed, I kinda feel sorry for her. Do take care to use earphones or headphones as Lara does get hurt a lot, which may lead to questionable sounds.
And have a good time. Just know that the game does have the usual open world bloat, and every mission is a 'fetch quest'. The quest givers are pretty much one note and forgettable. The ending as well leaves a lot to be desired, but the package overall is good.
A definite must play, especially for local coop. The gameplay may be a bit basic for more seasoned gamers, but playing with a sibling or a friend who does not care to play 'optimally' brings out the best in the game. In a perfect world, the scale of the movies would be represented but what is here is well worth the money.
TL DR; If you are thinking of buying this over another game, you can skip this. The music is servicable but does not really change during emotional beats within dialouge which would really help the lack of voice acting. The cutscenes with voice acting though sound 'read' and not 'said'. The writting is okay for the most part, it just fails to hold my attention near the mid point. Characters are the best part of the game especially Kael. Everybody has something bad in their past, in-fighting ensues, everybody makes up in the end. Now repeat that. Turn-based combat is good, with a timed QTE to keep your attention. Strategy mode though is the weakest combat mode in my opinion, as the stats that I am building up don't seem to matter. The weakest link by far are the quests (1) fetch quests, and (2) find this item quests.
(I played this local coop) I played this with my sibling who is not into videogames, and so the simplistic puzzles, platforming eased them into the game. However, towards the end, the jumping-platforming was too frequent, and felt like the devs ran out of puzzles or things to throw at us. Thankfully it was the right game length as the puzzles, lack of enemies, and forgettable story was starting to get boring. Here's hoping that the sequels improves upon the solid foundation this game brought.
(A Modded Playthrough) I was disappointed by how it does not take the story, characters, world, and quests beyond it's simple premise. If you are a fan of RPGs, of great stories, and of deep characters then play the game with the knowledge that Fo4 is more of a shooter, less of an RPG. That said, I will be doing another playthrough and heavily mod it. One thing you can expect from Bethesda is that the mods are incredible.
it would be better to have the option to indicate if the objective is above or below the current area, as well as the opacity of terrain above Terriel. I got the bad ending but I did not have the motivation for another playthrough, if ever there is a sequel, I hope the game devs imrpove on the game.
