Shagger

I'd live in the world of Harry Potter then dedicate my time to perfecting my "make money" spell until I'm a millionaire. Don't look at me and think "You can't have your cake and eat it." That's a stupid expression anyway, why else would I want my cake if I wasn't gonna eat it?

If every game was so similar to each other that there was no need for tutorials at all we'd bee in a pretty sorry state. Without thier own indigenous control quirks games just wouldn't have thier own identity. A case can be made that if a game is easy to play without a tutorial, that's a sign of a game that's got a very well suited and intuitive control set up, but I still would like to think every new game has something a little different to offer. I'm hearing you on JRPG's. Don't get me wrong, I love the genre, but they almost always have to take some getting used to. I touched on that when I reviewed Tales of Arise recently.

Strange thing is I haven't actually played any of those, so I can't really say. I see it going to Resident Evil: Village or Deathloop. Either way, it must be said looking at that list has really sobered me up to the fact this has been a pretty dismal year.

It's is hard to get these companies to pay attention to the simple collective message that the state is this game is unacceptable. It's even harder when said companies have to deal with Jane from accounting has somebody persistently telling her to kill herself on twitter. If you were, let's say, a HR manager at said game company, what one of those two situations would be a higher and/or more immediate priority? Exactly, it would Jane from accounting. That's why this shit doesn't help and in fact only slows the response from a company to address the concerns of the customer base.

When it come to the kind of stuff surrounding people like Activision/Blizzard and thier abusive culture, that's a different matter and more complex. That's about how people treat people and their are individuals who have done serious wrong. When it's something as arbitrary as a game's lunch state, we handle it, as the community, by showcasing and talking about and bring those concerns to representatives of the company and make it clear "This isn't acceptable". We demand refunds, we publicly refuse to buy thier games until they are in an acceptable state. We write reviews for other people to read to spread the word about these issues. But most importantly of all, we do all of that in a civilised manner. We don't go to individuals social media accounts and give them hell just because they work there, whether they be the CEO, the janitor or anyone in between as no person is to blame for these things and no one person is in a position to fix these issues alone. Yes, there are people who need to be held accountable in these situations, especially in upper management, but that doesn't mean it's acceptable nor helpful to target individuals armed with one's frustrations.

Wrong, NOBODY should be attacked. Not even at the executive level. Even if if it's an abuse, corrupt scumbag like Bobby Kotick, what you do is not buy thier games and criticise the company by joining the voices saying he should resign. In the case of Rockstar and Grove Street Games, criticise the poor quality of a game publicly, but for the love of god don't "attack" anyone.

Welcome to the VGR community. Here's hoping you will learn to trust us and open up so we can get to know you, but for now, we're happy to have you.

Think of it this way. Let's say Boeing come out with a band new passenger airliner and that airliner has a crash because of some design flaw. What you're saying is that it's OK to "go after" the guy who's job it was to secure the planes toilet just because he listed himself as an employee of Boeing on social media. That it's fair to blame that one flight attendant that just happened to survive the crash and went to social media to alert people to what had happened because she works for the airline . That the PR representatives for the airline and Boeing deserve to get threatened and harassed by an angry public even though they had nothing to do with what caused the accident. I don't know what it is you think you look like when you say stupid shit like this, but let me assure it's not good.

For the what I promise will be the only time I take this thread seriously (Sorry @DC, but I don't think I'd be doing this right if I didn't least try to take the piss a little bit) posting suggested images could be little awkward here given the file size limit of avatar images on VGR, and that limit is around 500kb. For example, a direct upload of an avatar the correct size onto VGR would look like this; But it is possible for it to look like this on thread; This just make the image look better on the thread, but it's obviously the first image that's the one that will be used in the end. GIF's will also look smaller, here's my avatar uploaded directly to the forum page. So it's all worth bearing in mind.

I've got to be honest and this... looks awful. There's a million ways to play the classic Pac-Man without this, the Pac-Man side scrollers are notoriously terrible and no Ms Pac-Man in the collection? Add to that a very suspicious currency = reward system and my enthusiasm for this evaporates very quickly.

You say you do not condole harassment, then in very next entrance describe going after individual employees on social media as acceptable instead of doing the right thing and calling out the company as a whole. Give as many coasts of paint you want make it look noble, but that is harassment. I explain the difference in the part of my post you, for some reason, left out of your quotes... I believe that these individuals and companies get both healthy critisisum and unhelpful bile and anger. The clear difference between us, and what indeed does makes this debate very open in general, is how each person defines the difference between harassment and criticism. Making a YouTube reporting on the issue, that's criticism. Posting on forums describing what's going on, that's criticism. Complaining to persons representing that company who's job it is to collect feedback in respectful manner, that's also fine. Going to the personal social media account of some random "designer" to shoulder the blame on them is not cool, just like how it's not fair blame the waiter/waitress in my pervious example. But you seem to think it's OK to send these individuals all your bile and frustrated anger just because they list that they work at "Game Company X". Because guess what, it's very common for somebody to have "I Work at Game Company X" on thier personal twitter profile. A lot of people list thier place of work on social media profiles, whether it be in the game industry or not.

Sorry, I actually make a typo. I meant FFXIII. FFXII actually was a fairly challenging game at times as a strategy experience. The gambit system automated a lot of the combat, but it was still up to the player to set them up to suit each situation, especially against the tougher marks. FFXII took that away and instead had the characters "learn" the strategy on thier own. Not that FFXII didn't have issues, especially the original release. If FFXIII's levelling system was too restrictive (and it was), the FFXII's was way too open. It had a rubbish tutorial, it was cryptic, made a characters strength depend almost entirely on the gear they used and left the only way to level the characters efficiently was pretty to make them all exactly the same. Thankfully, FFXII The Zodiac Age fixed a lot of these issues by introducing a class system. If you haven't tried that version, I'd highly recommend it. I'd also have to disagree on FFXII as a storytelling experience. I thought it was on of the most mature and complex, yet relatable stories a Final Fantasy game has ever had.

No, it's members of the public harassing Rockstar's employees on social media and forums over the state of GTA The Trilogy The Definitive Edition. Calling the company out for the sorry state the game launched in is one thing, going the the profiles of individual employees of the company to issue threats and vile insults is another. If you really condemn harassment of a game company's employees over situations like this, you would condemn it rather than just accuse Rockstar of hyperbole. You didn't do that. Instead, without any proof that Rockstar's claims are an exaggeration, you just dismissed the harassment as people criticising this bad launch. Frankly, that's a little worrying. Almost as worrying is the part I've highlighted as that literally is harassment what you describe. Going to an individual dev's twitter account to blame, piss and moan doesn't help. It's hardly likely that individual was in a position to cause this problem alone, nor are they alone in thier responsibility to fix it. At best, it's not at all helpful, but it's actually more like having a restaurant customer scream bloody murder at the server because thier steak was undercooked. It's just a loud, degrading spew of anger that's not even directed at the person responsible. Would you do that to you waiter/waitress? Probably not, so why is it OK to target individual dev's on social media in this situation? Call out the company, make YouTube videos, post of forums and reddit and on company social media accounts, that's how it's done. Going to an individuals social media account to shoulder them with the blame and criticism just because they work there is unacceptable. That IS harassment. So in actual fact, whether you know it or not, you do condone harassment. People who participate in or condone this kind of behaviour are big part of the problem. It makes game companies take the genuine criticism less seriously and divides thier attention in hinderance to addressing the issues that are brought up. You pretty said so yourself! So take a look yourself and what say and give it at least some thought before you post.

Final Fantasy XIII is one that comes to mind. The combat looked cool, but wasn't nearly as engaging or complex as it appeared. The party AI learned easily how to fight the enemies and how to exploit elemental weaknesses and so on with no real command nor input from the player. So that pretty much cancelled out the strategy elements of combat, and with without the level of skill based input that one would see in a Tales game, for example, that turned combat into a tedious chore. Grinding was also powerful at times in the game, so even though there were barriers and limits to how far you could lever the characters until you got to the next part of the story, you could still get the party well ahead of the game and build up points to spend to make the party well overpowered when the levelling system opened up again.

Locking this as there are other threads discussing the same topic, like here for example.

My favourite has been the Burnout franchise (minus Burnout Paradise), especially Burnout 3. The series has sadly been dead for quite some time. I haven't really been that into racing games since, but I did enjoy what I've played of the Forza: Horizon games.

I think given the OP's content and because this was posted to general gaming, we can take this thread as a thread about video games based off cue sports and the thread you mentioned, as part of general chat, as a thread dedicated to real life cue sports. Thanks for pointing that out though as I feel it was important to make that distinction.

I've been looking into this and it seems Chess.com allows you to embed a chess game have played on thier site as a kind of "recap", but an actually live, interactive chess board. @Crazycrab, can you please link me to what you have found?

At what point did I indicate that people simply calling Rockstar out on this as harassment? Between me and Rockstar, we're not stupid enough to not be able to tell the difference. You know as well as I do that people have been actually harassing staff at Rockstar and/or Grove Street Games become someone always does. I don't understand why you always feel compelled to deny these things every time it comes up.

Honestly, I used to hate Christmas music...

Disclaimer Welcome VGR to the second Shagger says review I ever wrote. As I stated in the Rise of the Tomb Raider review, this goes back to a time before VGR ad I just wanted to have all of these reviews up on this site. It is just a repost here exactly as it was only with some new banners So, enjoy! Review The last time I did one of these big, written reviews was on what is considered to be one of this games biggest rivals, Rise of the Tomb Raider, but having now played this game, I find it actually has at least as much in common with something else... ...Given that these two games were made buy the same people, I shouldn't really be surprised, nor should anyone be pessimistic because a blend of Rise of The Tomb Raider and The Last of Us sounds great right! Aaahhhhhhh..... this is the part I'm gonna piss someone off. Better get ready... Oh, that's snug! It doesn't matter whether you compare this to The Last of Us or Rise of the Tomb Raider, this is NOT as good as either of those games! I'm sorry, it just isn't! Now don't get wrong, Uncharted 4 is a great game and I enjoyed it immensely, no game than can glue me to the sofa for 18 hours over two days isn't great, but as much as I like liked this game, it lacks in certain important areas that I think a lot of people either don't notice or ignore. Still, to calm down the people already sharpening their pitchforks, lets start with the good stuff. When I reviewed Rise of the Tomb Raider I thought that game was stunning, and it is, but this next gen effort from Naughty Dog make Rise' look it's being played on a broken ass 70's TV smeared with KY jelly! This is by a country mile the best looking game I've ever played. I barely even know where to start. It's like every single pixel in this game had someone spend several minutes contemplating whether that was the right placement and color for it. It's actually a little disappointing that the game isn't as open as some other games so you can check out more of the amazing environments and locations you see. The game is rightfully proud of the environments and setting, they're gorgeous, enhanced by great draw distances with very sharp textures from both far away and close up. There's also a great deal of life and non-player related actions going on with little animals scurrying about in the corner of your eye, the grass and leaves and other aspects of the world moving around naturally. The best part is the fantastic photo mode is back from The Last of Us: Remastered so one can capture these amazing places in a fun and creative way. The character models and animations are so realistic and natural looking, no doubt due to the same kind of capture animation work we saw in The Last of Us. It's not overly cinematic though, this still feels like a game throughout, it's just and incredibly detailed, almost photo-realistic one. Allot is borrowed from The Last Of Us in other ways too with basically the same dynamic, usually hidden UI and a natural view of documents and Drake's Journal. This is important in what is a very story-focused game to break tandem as little as humanly possible and Naughty Dog have proven yet again they are the kings. The game also runs like a dream. No FPS problems, crashes or glitches to report, it's just beautifully crafted. I mean fuck it! in this regard, this game deserves the Spinal Tap treatment! 11/10 Now, I'm not gonna spend to much time on this for two reasons. One, it'll be very hard to go into any detail at all without leaving spoilers and two, being from the same people that brought you The Last of Us, you know what to expect. Think National Treasure except longer, better, not stupid and without Nicolas Cage (Although I have to admit that I'm not sure if that last one is a positive or a negative.) and that's basically the idea. The good thing is that one doesn't need to know anything about the previous Uncharted games to follow this story, but there is plenty of fan service for those that have played them. Nathan Drake now retired from, well, being Nathan Drake, is drawn back into seeking a long lost pirate treasure to pay off a dept left buy his brother Sam... and that's about all I can say without spoiling anything, so I'll just move on. The story isn't that groundbreaking, but like in The Last of Us it's told in such a believable way with very character driven, natural writing and superb voice acting is what makes the game so addicting, you simply don't want to put it down and wait 'till tomorrow to see what happens next. I don't find the lure in this as interesting as The Last of Us, and I wouldn't say the story is actually better than Rise of the Tomb Raider either, just better told with more focus and better developed characters, it's just an undeniably engrossing storytelling experience that rivals just about any game, movie or TV show I've seen and is actually my favorite part of the game. This is what you're paying for with this game and it's where most of the value comes from. 9/10 Wait, let check something first... Yep, still fits. You know how I said this game isn't as good as Rise of the Tomb Raider? Yes, of course you do, you're still sharpening your pitchfork. Well, I say that because despite Uncharted 4 being better in looks and story, it is inferior where it's most important, the actual gameplay. Now, this is a good game to play, don't get me wrong, but my problems are not so much with what's here and more with what isn't. Think about it; Levelling Mechanics The Last of Us: Use herbs in the world as a kind of currency to upgrade stat's and abilities. Rise of the Tomb Raider: Earn XP from story missions, side activities, collectibles and enemy kills to acquire skill points to purchase new skills from 3 different skill trees. Between Rise of the Tomb Raider and The Last of Us, this is the superior system. Uncharted 4: Nothing. Upgrade/Crafting Mechanics The Last of Us: Gather parts and salvage from the world to improve your weapons in a number ways. One can also create other items that share common ingredients and given resources are limited, so you have to decide what upgrades matter most. Objects found in the world can be actively modified and used as weapons. Rise of the Tomb Raider: Hunt and scavenge to find materials, components, salvage, animal pelts another resources that, like in The Last of Us, share common purposes so you have to choose what weapons and craft items are the most valuable to you. Again like The Last of Us you can make weapons out of objects lying around. There is more variety to the crafting and upgrade mechanics overall in Rise of the Tomb Raider compared to The Last of Us, so this is again the superior system. Uncharted 4: Nothing I'm not saying that every game has to have these kinds of mechanics, I'm just making a point that when The Last of Us, a game that clearly provides allot of the DNA for Uncharted 4 has these ideas and it's big (timed) exclusive rival on Xbox, Rise of the Tomb Raider also has such mechanics and takes them even further improving on it's predecessor significantly, it really bugs me that there is actually so little here. Uncharted 4 is way more linear than Rise' so offers way less room to explore it's undeniably beautiful world, so it feels like a bit of a wasted opportunity. I know some of you may be thinking "Why does it have to be like Tomb Raider anyway? You don't to explore in every game of this type" and you know, I'd agree with you, if it wasn't for this; Why does it have a crappier version of the same treasure collection and inspection mechanic as Tomb Raider? Besides, none of these objects are interesting. There's no good description of what they are or where they came from, they don't tie into the game story nor the environment in which you find them and whilst you can roll them around and look at them you can't learn anything additional about them like you can with some of the relics in Tomb Raider. Worst of all, because there's no levelling mechanic for this system to tie into, there's no meaningful incentive to even bother collecting them in the first place. This is a half-assed, tacked on, copy-cat mechanic that serves no purpose. Do yourselves a favour, if you play Uncharted 4 and see something blinking on the ground, ignore it, it's just there to waste your time. Both Tomb Raider and Uncharted 4 use similar 3rd person platforming and climbing mechanics and whilst these are superb in both games, Uncharted I just don't find as fun because the controls are slower and feel more fussy and there is less options for movement. In Rise', one can use climbing axes on walls and ice, swing and climb on ropes, rope slide, use climbing arrows along with the usual normal run, climb and jump stuff. In Uncharted, there's a rope you can hook onto things to climb and swing from and a spike you push into a wall that's basically a slower, more cumbersome version of the climbing axes from Tomb Raider, and that's about it. You can't even sprint for God sake! That's becoming a pet peeve of mine. Why do so many games not have this? Even The Last of Us had a sprint button! Why use The Last of Us engine as backbone for this when you take out so much of the good stuff? You drive a car and a boat at times in the game, but there isn't much to say other than an acknowledgement that they are well executed. The car especially is allot of fun being a 4x4 and you can winch things and I wish there was more of that. Combat is a similar story. Again, there's nothing really wrong with it in Uncharted 4, it's fantastic in fact, but there's just less to it. You can hold two weapons at a time and swap them for guns you pick up, so in this regard it plays like a typical modern 3rd or 1st person shooter. The shooting mechanics are great, the guns have punch and you can feel the variety in them thanks partly to some superb sound design and realistic visual recoil. The enemy AI is well programmed and even on the stranded difficulty the game is decent challenge, so a point there against Rise' where you have to play "Seasoned Raider" for it to be the same level. Despite that, I prefer Rise' because there's a better variety of enemies, especially if you count the hunting mechanics, a choice of four class of weapons you can switch to at any time including stealth weapons, something Uncharted 4 doesn't have outside of multiplayer. Speaking of stealth, everything is perfectly fine in Uncharted. Nothing we haven't seen before in other games so I'm not gonna go to far into it, but compare to The Last of Us it's a downgrade as stealth was such a huge part in that game and compared to Rise' there's less incentive to use it as you so often sneak past a group of enemies, find you target zone is choke point where it's impossible not to be spotted, so you have to battle all the enemies you just snuck past from a corner. No, that happened to me all time, so it can't be a coincidence. Another thing that happened to me at least 3 or 4 times is enemies spawning behind me at checkpoints. Like most games, the sections of the game have automatic checkpoints you go back to when you die to replay that section. The combat and platforming sections in Uncharted 4 are pretty long, and that's fine, and thus have checkpoints within them. The thing is though during some of the combat sections I start a checkpoint somewhere in the middle of the combat section and I find the enemies that I killed to get there have re-spawned behind me! One point in particular after dying I found myself under attack from RPG's and Assault rifles ahead of me with 3 guys behind attracting with guns in a pincer! So, because I died the first time trying to take on the RPG group that was hard enough, I then have to fight that group plus the group I took out to get their in the first place while unfairly out flanked. So as you my have guessed, I had to re-play this section over and over in haze of frustration. I was really impressed by the melee combat at first with all the double take downs I was pulling off in the prison fight and all that but my joy was short lived as I began to realize the games superb animations are cover for how scripted the melee combat really is. The Last of Us, again, was better in this regard in my opinion, it's just felt more real. Rise of the Tomb Raider's melee combat isn't great, in fact it's worse, but at least I felt I had control over it and that game doesn't focus on melee that much. The combat is broken up buy a number of puzzle sections. Now, there isn't much to say here either, they're relatively easy and aside from story tie-ins, not that memorable. The Tombs In Tomb Raider I prefer because it's a similar level of problem solving along with a dynamic test of reflexes and ability to negotiate platforms as well. The game does claw back points with the multiplayer. Here, the game feels faster and more fluent with good verticality and movement. The games fine gun combat serves well here to and employs a kind of MOBA style in match purchasing mechanic to obtain more powerful weapons and abilities for a short time. This looks very promising to me at the moment, but I've not played that much of it yet, so I'll have to play a bit with it and update this part of the review. If anyone want's to give their input on the multiplayer let me know because I think having others input is helpful to cover the bases. It is better the Rise of The Tomb Raider here given the fact Rise of the Tomb Raiser has no multiplayer... so yeah. Multiplayer aside, my thoughts on the gameplay are this. They did what was adequate and said, "That'll do". It's a very enjoyable game, but I was just expecting so much more for a hyped, modern, big budget adventure from a developer that I know can do much better than this. Good gameplay mechanics, but half in quantity of what you'd want from a game like this, really only one way to score the game in this regard. 5/10 Final Verdict

DISCLAIMER Hi VGR! I present to you the very first Shagger Says review I ever wrote. I'm also publishing the follow up on Uncharted 4 as well. I said in a post recently that the only place to see all of the reviews I had written was here on VGR. I later remembered that wasn't the case and both this and the Uncharted 4 review were still up on another forum I used to grace, but hadn't been put up here. So mostly just to neaten things up, I decided to put both of these reviews on here so we know that the collection is complete and to give you guys an insight into my early efforts to see how you thinks it's changed, if at all. That's why I've put them up exactly as they were with no changes. with the exception of new banners and artwork as some of those seem to have been lost. Now, when I wrote this review Rise of The Tomb Raider was still an XBox Exclusive that would eventually come to PC and PS4 as well. Just putting that out there just in case something written with regard to it's exclusivity comes up and doesn't make sense now in 2021. Anyway, thank you in advance for indulging in a little of my nostalgic past. Enjoy both this and the Uncharted 4 review! Review To say this game will change your life would probably not be true, but just couple of years after Crystal Dynamics created the critically acclaimed reboot of the Tomb Raider franchise to see it perfected is very satisfying. The best way to sum this is up is to say that this is the first game from 2013 with almost every little bit done a little bit better, and with the first game being as good as was, to make it that much better is not easy. Despite the first game being well received, this games timed exclusivity and microinstructions announced before the launch has contributed to this games difficult launch. The biggest problem is a very bad launch time right in a crowed of other games, including coming out the same day Fallout 4 on the Xbox One and the aforementioned timed exclusivity that is understandably frustrating for PlayStation 4 and PC owners. However, the benefit here is others can give you their insights on this XB1 version before you guys have to take an unsure plunge into this game. Not that this is necessary, because I would recommend this game utterly to anyone who loves action adventure games. If that's all you need to know, then go ahead and get this game now on Xbox or later on PC or PS4. For the rest, lets get to it. Obviously I want to keep this spoiler free, and this is my own interpretation of the story. You, of course, play as Lara Croft set about a year after the events of the 2013 game on the trail of a relic or power her father, Lord Richard Croft, was pursuing before he died in 2003. His former partner, Ana, tries to warn Lara that perusing this relic known as The Divine Source, said to grant immortality, ruined her father's reputation and her looking for it would only drag her family name further through the mud, but Lara is convinced her father was right about the relic's existence and want's to restore his reputation. Her hunt leads her to Siberia and the descendants of the followers of an ancient prophet who have guarded The Divine Source for generations. Lara is not the only one seeks The Divine Source. An ancient and secretive religious order called Trinity are after the relic and have been after it for centuries. This particular group from Trinity are lead by a man named Konstantin, a mysterious stigmata sufferer with a more personal agenda for taking on this quest. Trinity have enough knowledge and far better resources than the native population and will succeed in obtaining The Divine Source unless Lara get there first. Lara will have to battle the harsh environments of Siberia, the elite mercenaries of Trinity and win the trust of the local people lead buy a man named Jacob to stop Trinity obtaining The Divine Source and the power to take over the world. Granted, this plot-line a bit cliché , has been seen before and is not as unique and interesting as the previous game, but is told with writing voice acting that is of good enough quality that it will keep you interested. Camilla Luddington returns as Lara Croft and delivers on of the best voice performances of the year in a video game. There is enough interesting back-story, twists and turns and exposition that I don't want to spoil that you won't necessarily see it coming and you will want to see where it goes. What I do miss are the characters from the previous game. Jonah is the only one that returns and most of the new characters (which, in total, is much smaller cast) aren't as interesting as the others from the previous game. I also miss that sense of vulnerability that Lara had in the previous game, but I can't blame the game for that given that this is a sequel and she's already been through that stuff, so it makes sense she's a more hardened Lara this time. It's also appropriate that what Lara faced before is more than a straight forward battle to survive and escape against savaged islanders, but this time it's something more potent and personal, so it's a good set up even the story around it isn't that unique. The ending is also very sequel bait, and that's annoying. Also the first part of the final boss fight is cool, but the second part is not. The set up for it, the gameplay idea, is cool, but's over to fast. Overall, I didn't enjoy the story quite as much as the last game, but not by much. There are games considered good in terms of story that are worse than this one. Let me put it this way, if the Tomb Raider movies were as good as this, they would probably receive high praise. Score for Story 7/10 Like any game, this is the most important part and will carry the most weight in my final score. The game is very similar to the previous one, so if you've played that you kinda get the idea and so what I'm gonna do is talk about how the game has changed and improved. If you haven't played the previous game, check out The Angry Joe Show's review of it below to give you the basic idea. Now you should know the basics, here's what's new. There is a number of new mechanics to the way you control Lara including a rope swing, a wire tied to your climbing axe to grab ledges and also swing between platforms. There also a swimming mechanic that allows Lara to explore both under and on top of the water and dive into the water from higher ledges. You can't really control how deep Lara swims, so it's kinda scripted that way, but the underwater sections are designed so that this didn't bother me and nothing was locked out. There's also a sprint mechanic, a nice new feature, and broad-head climbing arrows you can fire into wooden walls and panels to reach certain areas. The UI for in-game movement has been improved and shows clearly what your rope arrows and other special items are gonna do when you use the control. This is all good as, even though this isn't a fully open world game, it does play more like one with more open exploration than we had before. This is something you'll want to do as collectibles like documents, murals and other objects don't just give you XP to level Lara for new perks but can also improve your profanity in languages that allow to read carvings and obelisks to find out about other secrets. One of the new things this can lead to is special coins that can be traded in for advanced weapons and accessories that can't be obtained any other way. The tombs and 3rd person platforming sections are back and are for the most part much improved and more numerous. Basically, they're more challenging with less QTE (In fact, there's almost none of it this time) throughout the game and problem solving that tests you mind a little more. The multitude of new movement mechanics gives more room to create multiple paths to complete a section and even though the game is still quite liner there has been improvement in this regard. All this ties into the survival instincts that offers hints to solving these sections just like the previous game. One of the biggest changes is to the crafting system to improve your weapons and craft special ammunition like poison arrows, hollow point bullets and grenades. These all require specific components obtained by hunting and scavenging and are also way more dynamic and critical as you know longer obtain simple "salvage" from everything. If you want one tip, do allot of hunting and do not wait to begin gathering as much of this stuff as you can. Some "exotic" animals have to be hunted to obtain the rarer stuff, but these are often also the more dangerous creatures as well, so be prepared for them. Combat mechanics are more or less the same as the previous game. It's basically a 3PS with a natural cover mechanic with weapons consisting of a bow, rifle, shotgun and pistol to choose from. There is now various types of these weapons that you collect through the game. For example, your rifles include an SMG, assault rifle, bolt action rifle and military spec' carbine that can be purchased using the aforementioned coins. None of these variations of these weapons are really better that the other, they just have different traits and they can all be improved with crafting, so you have to decide what one you want to improve when you have the chance at base camps. The one thing I find annoying about this is that you can't switch between different types of each weapon class in game, it can only be done at camps, but there's more camps than before and you can fast travel between all of them now, so this didn't bother me to much. Using the weapons in combat is very similar to before, but combat has improved because of much improved enemy AI and more interaction with the environment that even allows you to craft smoke grenades, Molotov cocktails and proximity bombs out of cans, fuel canisters, bottles and radios you find lying around. Like I said, the AI has improved dramatically from the first game making better use of cover, using communication and tactics to out flank and over power you and even learning from your past behavior. The patterns on melee attacks and grenade throws feel less predictable as well and being an elite private army, the enemies are better armored and have better weapons adding more difficulty to the combat. This helps address one of my biggest complaints about the previous game in that it was a bit on the easy side, although Lara is still unrealistically tough and can even bandage herself up in combat now. Frankly, if they wanted to include that, they should have removed or at least slowed the regenerating health. As a result, I'll still call the combat a bit easy, but more enjoyable. So, if you want a challenge, don't play on normal. Now, time for the elephant in the room, the microtransactions. This is attached to cards that can be used in the expeditions, a kind of challenge mode, outside of the main story. Basically, you can use the card to boost the amount of points you can score at the cost of making the game harder in some way, make the game easier at the cost of points of just activity silly, fun stuff like Big Head mode. You can earn these card packs with credits earned in game buy completing Challenges and Tombs and from doing the expeditions themselves, or you can buy them with real money. Now, the microtransactions in this game don't actually bug me. Why? Because they didn't bug me. If it wasn't for internet rage about them I wouldn't have known they were there. The meat of the game is the campaign, and because the cards aren't used there, I can't complain. This makes it different to Halo 5, for example, because the microtransactions in that game cheapen the effort people put into earning them instead of buying them. This doesn't. If people really want to get this content more quickly and are willing to pay for it that doesn't hurt you. The rest of us are smart enough to avoid them and it's another excuse to do more play-throughs to earn the credits instead, that's assuming one even has a big interest in the expeditions in the first place. The game is actually has more value to it if you don't buy them, These in-game purchases are not only better to ignore, but easy to ignore, so do that, ignore them. Trust me, they won't bug you. Basically, this is the old game but better and it's up to a level where it's damn near faultless. The only thing that really got to with gameplay is the lack of a control to use the glow-sticks to light up dark areas. It's supposed to be automatic, but it's triggered by reaching specific locations, not by how dark it is, so I still found myself stuck in the dark struggling to find my way out on a few occasions. Just put in a control to activate the glow-sticks manually as well as the automatic system! This didn't bother me enough to detract from the experience that much, the gameplay is just brilliant here and improved on what was already a truly fantastic game to play. Score for Gameplay 9.5/10 Now, anyone who knows me on these threads know I don't consider frame rates and resolutions to be all that critical, those are just numbers, they are meaningless in themselves. I like to keep it simple and I honestly don't know or even care what this runs at on XBox One, so anyone wants to know, google will surely inform you, but trust me, it doesn't matter. You cannot boil you sense of gaming down to numbers. Great looking games come from great design, especially in a fantasy. Yes, this is set mostly in Siberia, a real place, but it's the art team's interpretation of Siberia, I don't know how accurate it really is, but what's important is this game is a joy to look at. I was in absolute awe both at the environments and the attention to detail that went into this. The tracks Lara leaves the snow that change direction as you walk, the water and splash mechanics, the facial animations, I could go on, but this is one of the best looking games I have played, and I can only imagine how it might look when someone get's it on PC and runs it on it's highest settings. Long draw distances, great character models, although I will say there's not as much variety to the environments as the last game, I was surprised at how much better this looks than even the definitive edition of that game. It's all about the little things like the way the trees move in the wind, the weather, the superb sound design just make this game feel alive and immersive. There were a couple of graphical hic-ups here and there and the game did crash on me once, but my XBox was acting weird in general at the time so it might have been that. Otherwise, the game runs well with no serious frame rate dips I noticed nor problematic bugs. This bodes well for the PC and PS4 versions as well. Also, whether this is a problem or not comes down to opinion, but the Lara death shots that were almost a Mortal Kombat level of brutal before, have been toned down quite a bit. Whether Crystal Dynamics wanted people to focus on other area's of the game or if they just wussed out and removed them I'm not sure, but it's worth noting. Overall, it's Gorgeous, 10/10 Finial Verdict

I game o a laptop and still very much consider that PC gaming. The software and hardware architecture is the same regardless.