Rise of the Tomb Raider: 20 Year Celebration - PlayStation 4

Rise of the Tomb Raider is the second game from the 2013 reboot Tomb Raider following the new Lara Croft as she goes to find the divine source, the secret to immortality from the lost city of Kitezh hidden in the remote wilderness of Siberia. Does Tomb Raider get the treasure or does it get lost in the snowy wilderness of siberia.Positives:Graphics: are amazing in this game with lots of destruction, great lighting and expensive rendering shampoo for Lara’s hire. If you have a PS4 Pro you get even more graphical choices with higher frame rate, higher visuals, and 4K gaming. Not a lot of games on console do this at all mostly kept to the PC. So Rise of the Tomb Raider is gorgeous to look at a good showcase for the PS4 Pro. Still looks good on standard PS4 for those who don’t want a pro. Plus I am sure half of the game’s budget went to render Lara’s hair which is the best looking hair in gamingGameplay: Largely the same from the previous game. The same Metroidvania style with more emphasis on survival than the last one. At least on high difficulties as in the normal and easy you can easily rambo your way through trinities force like they were training dummies. If you play on Survivor like me then enemies are no pushovers they flank and try to out maneuver all while on limited resources. It reminded me a lot of the Last of Us crafting looking for ammo, You consistently upgrade your weapons and level up skills on the skill tree. As is tradition by the end of the game Lara becomes an unkillable goddess that can’t be killed no matter what difficulty which is very rewarding as always.Tombs: make a triumphant return with 9 unique tombs all holding various upgrades for Lara. Like the last game these are the best part of the game as you explore the beautifully crafted areas and solve puzzles. The puzzles are not too hard I only had to look up one the baths of kitezh. Did all of them and they were all well made at no point did any tombs feel lazy or padding.Lore: the story of rise was boring and average but the lore from the game was great. You go to Russia to find the lost city of kitezh. You find the natives of the land descends of the Byzantine empire. The various different groups that came here the soviets, mongols, and trinity assassins. An ancient prophet from the former empire of Byzantium that was excommunicated. The lore has the best writing in the game.DLC: As a result of Playstation owners waiting for a year all the DLC comer with the game. Essentially the 20th year anniversary is a game of the year edition which came with a limited artbook from the 20 years of tomb raider. The Artbook was nice bonus and the game being complete is the cherry on top of this sundae. The DLC’s include Baba Yaga the best one, opens a new section in the metroidvania map. Endurance Co-op a survival mode with two play co-op. Cold Darkness awakened a Zombie mode and a nice epilogue blood ties explore the new famous croft manor pick up relics and documents that show lara’s past and family upbringing. I would say the year wait was worth the wait as you get the complete experienceNegatives:Story: The story is pretty boring. While it was fun learning the lore the quality of the writing dips with the story. Lara’s trip to Siberia lead Trinity a Zealot military group to go after her lead by konstantin a fanatic who's not a very interesting villain which is a shame because those make compelling villains but Konstantin is a generic bad guy that occasionally mentions god. Not to mention the boss fight with him was a joke you hide and stealth kill three time and boom dead. If you want to play Tomb Raider for the Story you are better off playing something else.Release: Tomb Raider had a bad release first announce as a xbox one timed exclusive and releasing on the same day as fallout 4 also having the PS4 Port coming in the fall with all the new game releases was another bad call. The Reason I bring make this a negative is due to self sabotaging their own game’s hype as it got buried by bigger titles. Many people passed on this game because it got overshadowed with two bad release dates. Next Tomb Raider game which will 100% come out near the time of the live action movie reboot better have a better release dateExpeditions/Microtransactions: The multiplayer from the first game is gone which is good because it was not good and nobody played it. Instead it is replaced by Expeditions an arcade mode. Wouldn’t care until I saw the modifier cards are a form of microtransactions. Multiplayer maybe gone by Square Enix still wants them shekels and while it's all optional it shouldn’t be an option to buy modifications for an arcade mode Expeditions is not even good it's not bad but it’s not good either. I played through it once and never touched again as I saw no reason to it felt out of place for a metroidvania game to have a linear arcade mode.Conclusions;Despite some issue I found Rise of the Tomb Raider to be a great game and highly recommend it, Dare I say I enjoyed Rise of the Tomb Raider more than Uncharted 4 which was overrated to be honest. Although Rise of the Tomb Raider didn’t do anything too new so if you didn’t like the reboot you won’t like this game but if you did like it this refines the it by adding more stuff and getting rid of things that didn’t work. It’s not all home runs but Rise is the definition of a great sequel.

Always a good game to play. Has a lot going on giving you lots to do. Like that there's puzzles to solve in addition to the shooting etc. Great value for the money.

I got the free trial of this game and loved it so decided to purchase the actual game. Still enjoyable and loving the graphics.

30% into the game, and Rise of Tomb Raider feels like a better overall action/adventure game than Uncharted4, and this is coming from a diehard Uncharted fan.-Ok from a visual perspective Rise of the Tomb Raider has some amount of inconsistency to it. Certain outdoor and indoor environments look stunning, while some don't quite have the wow factor in them. On Uncharted4, every section/level/environment is so well rendered and UC4's overal visual presentation is truly unmatched. That being said, ROTR has it's moments in it.-While UC4 was designed with The Last of Us gameplay-cinematics-gameplay template where you talk a lot with your AI buddy Sam make him give you boost, or catch up from a burning building and then have hours of walking around and not have enough engaging/memorable combat scenarios, the Rise of the Tomb Raider nails down the minute to minute gameplay. Don't get me wrong, the Last of Us had the perfect pacing and gameplay segments. But implementing that into UC4's narrative and gameplay, took away what UC stood for. So what did Uncharted stand for? Epic globetrotting experiences filled with breath taking high intense set piece moments. UC2 - Train sequence, Being chased by a heli through nepalian rooftops, escaping a collapsing world of Shambala / UC3 - escaping a sinking ship, being sucked out of plane in mid air, escaping a gigantic tsunami and i can keep going on and on. On Uncharted4, the set piece moments were few and far between and when you get to a set piece moment, you don't have time to realize/react to what's going to happen and I actually died a lot more often in UC4's set pieces than I've ever did with past Uncharted games. The pacing and placement of these things just didn't feel right. Ok I think i am heading towards UC4 review territory, lets get back to ROTR.-The game has input latency to it during pre launch,, this was addressed at PS4 Pro launch day with a patch. But in the process of fixing this issue, Frame pacing issues have been introduced on both base PS4 and PS4 Pro versions. But the developer who ported ROTR from Xbox One to Xbox360/PC/PS4/PS4 Pro has a reputating of catching and addressing things in time. So kudos to Nixxes( the developer who ported ROTR to all other platforms)-This is my first Tomb Raider experience ever in any entertainment form and it's got me thoroughly immersed. Thank you Crystal Dynamics for all your effort into crafting a wonderful action adventure experience.