I just finished RIse. For me Tomb Raider games are supposed to be Raiders of the Lost Ark but with Lara Croft - big mysterious jet-setting exotic treasure-hunting adventures. The reboot was not this, but I could understand why - for me it was like young Lara went on an Outward Bounds wilderness survival program to gain confidence and strength, learning to hunt and climb and use a bow and arrow and kill and fight...and to become Lara Croft. And at the end of that game it seemed she was poised to go on a big adventure in the next game. But with too much of Rise I felt like the developers didn't have the budget to make a proper sequel, so they added snow to the wilderness setting of the first game and called it Siberia, re-using all the same art assets. Both games have the same rustic wood cabins, settlements, saw mills, and towers, and old stone military bases. I have a suspicion that maybe there was a "Winter Wilderness DLC" for the last game, and somehow that got turned into the full game RIse. Anyway, for me, it felt cheap, same-y, and disappointing.
I think the developers knew that if they didn't do something fundamentally different in this same-y wilderness setting, that gamers would realize their cut-and-past job, so they made the first half of Rise be Lara Goes To Far Cry 4, i.e. an open world, collect-a-thon, she must choose sides between two groups fighting, and has 30 different ways to kill everyone along the way to her next objective point on the map. And for the first 6 hours I was like why is Lara in Far Cry? I didnt get it or like it.
Another problem here was that the the combat and a.i. felt dumbed down. In the last game there was more of a need to strategize - between stealth kills and using the bow, or knocking back a group of guys with a shotgun, hitting explosive barrels, etc. But in Rise I could literally melee kill groups of enemies that surrounded me in a few hits, over and over without dying, even ones wearing full sets of armor, from the beginning of the game to the end.
On the positive, by the end of Rise, the platforming had really opened up with lots of ways to traverse that I enjoyed.
Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition was my game of the year and I would have given it a 10/10. Rise of the Tomb Raider: 20 Year Celebration has been my second biggest disappointment this year and I would give it a 6/10