Jawmuncher
Member
So just finished ROTTR up. Have to say this easily excels Tomb Raider (2013) by a large margin. I would say it's comparable to the jump in quality from Uncharted 1 to Uncharted 2. Most know I wasn't too big of a fan of TR2013, but I really enjoyed my time with ROTTR, it pretty much fixed all of the issues I had with the prior game. The first being the story which is a huge improvement. I was interested the entire time through, and pretty invested with the characters enough to care what was going on. Which was not the case in the last game. It also helps that the villains are given a good amount of time to develop as well. Which goes a long way in making them interesting. Aside from that everything this time around just felt way more developed. Which should be the case in every sequel but was still very nice to see here. Speaking of which the overall formula of the game is still pretty similar to that of TR2013. You have a story mode and levels which are connected to numerous hubs in the game. All of which adds their own missions or items to gather and collect, along with hunting animals. Along with all of that you still have the optional tombs which are a bit more fleshed out then last time. However puzzles aren't all that frequent in the story, and the ones that do show are pretty easy. However the puzzles add a nice bit of variety, especially to the nice and spacious story levels. So it never feels as linear as say something like Uncharted. Also i have to applaud the game for it's stealth. While it's not going to push Splinter Cell or Metal Gear off the map, it's fun. When you get the combat knife you feel like the hunter. I was going out of my way to play areas in stealth compared to the first game, where I didn't really try. On top of the story mode with all the collectibles and activities I mentioned (Took me 10 hours with side pickings to achieve 64%), there is also a expedition mode. Expedition mode can be summed up as a sort of arcade mode. You earn booster packs while playing the campaign (Which you can also buy with real money or use in game credits on) that give you cards with numerous abilities. You can apply cards to the level you wish to replay with varying new factors. Such as enemies can dodge all melee attacks, everyone has a big head, you can't heal, and so much more. There's a lot of cards to be unlocked. The thing is that cards can either have a negative or positive effect on scoring. Cards with positive scores will give you more points at the end of the level, however they introduce handicaps. While cards with negative scores, will make your playthrough easier but at the cost of end of level points. With all of that said it's a fun mode to mess around with, and those who enjoy score based type trials should have fun with it. There's a lot of content here for a SP game and if the PC version comes with the season pass this is a easy recommend at full price. Hell even without it.
