I bought in the BST thread for 20 bucks a while back, figuring it would be a marginal improvement over the first game, which was passably enjoyable in spite of its awful, trite writing quality. I mainly was interested in decent gameplay and spectacular graphics.
But Jesus the game was so uninteresting in every regard I just plain old quit at the halfway point.
Boring collecting of endless garbage (literal junk just lying on the ground). None of the upgrades feel necessary or particularly game changing, more like a waste of time and an attempt to get you to explore every inch of a world that is fundamentally just not that interesting to begin with.
Horrible wrtiting. And I mean a REAL stinker in this department. One of Lara's first lines ("we're close to something Jonah, I can FEEL it") was just an instant eyeroll first impression, and it got worse from there. So much uninspired crap like that woman who was after the grail and was coughing and smoking and - oh what a surprise, she has lung cancer! Now we're supposed to think that she's a deep character because she has ONE trait? Just so trite and overdone.
The characters are all annoying. There's not a single person in that game I would ever choose to hang out with and somehow they make Lara come across as a complete whiny wimp, despite the fact she is doing amazing and death-defying shit for the whole game. The whole "scared girl becoming brave" angle just isn't appropriate for a character who debuted as a fucking cocky-as-hell badass devil-may-care tomb raider.
WEAK shooting. The AK sounds like someone tapping a piece of paper with back of their pencil, and there are so many armored enemies who render headshots totally meaningless.
Technically the graphics are great but the environments themselves feel so last generation - tons of wood shacks, brown buildings, brown rocks, etc. again the word "uninspired" comes to mind.
I wanted to like the game, and I plan on trying it again (to put my new GPU through the paces but also because I like to prove myself wrong).... But man when I think of the game there is just so much about it that is unappealing, bland, and joyless.