New Tomb Raider games are easily the third best game series. (Gaming)

by CruelLEGACEY , Toronto, Wednesday, March 14, 2018, 12:51 (2243 days ago) @ Korny

Currently.

Destiny, LIS, Tomb Raider. Those two games were awesome.

I'm all for personal opinions, but... You need to play way more games, man...

Tomb Raider alone:

Better characters and writing? Uncharted series.
Better gameplay, plot, visuals, quests, everything? Horizon Zero Dawn series (I know, one game and a standalone expansion don't make a series, but, it's 2-for-2 on great releases, so...)

That said, while Rise of the Tomb Raider was a fairly big letdown, Tomb Raider was easily one of my favorite games of the last generation, so this film was one that I was sure not to get excited for. Sucks to see the reboot series stagnate so quickly, when they got off to a phenomenal start...

I still hold the 2013 Tomb Raider in extremely high regard. I see where you’re coming from with the Uncharted/HZD comparisons, but breaking down the game that way is misleading, because it ignores the whole “sum of its parts” thing. Uncharted might have better writing and characters, but the gameplay is nowhere near as good as Tomb Raider. TR’s story is silly and over the top, but it fits the style of bombastic action game that they’re going for. And it’s well executed for what it is.

And on the gameplay front, you know how much I adore HZD, but TR’s combat and gameplay is exceptional. More to the point, they’re very different games (aside from the surface-level “female character with a bow & arrow” thing). HZD is an open-world game, through and through. Tomb Raider is a Metroid game. I’d say the closest direct modern comparison would be Batman: Arkham Asylum. Much tighter, linear-ish, with semi-open hub areas interconnected in a progressively more complex network of traversal points.
Rise of the Tomb Raider leans a bit further into “open-world” territory (just as the Arkham sequel, Arkham City, did), and it suffers a bit because of the more blown out nature (again, just like Arkham City).

So I just don’t think it’s accurate to tell someone to play Uncharted and/or HZD instead of Tomb Raider, because TR is a very different experience than either of those other games. Plus, it’s possibly the very best version of a modern Metroid-y game that exists.