I liked it, I've seen so much hate toward this one but I think it was pretty good. I've also seen some people saying this one did some things worse than Rise, and some better, I agree with that.
I liked the stealth but I think they should've polished the mechanics a lot more (maybe for the next one, I hope), covering yourself in mud and stalking and taking out groups of enemies was ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ awesome. I just wish some of the clunky stealth mechanics were better. They added so many cool things to play around with too, like the trap arrows and corpses (the corpse bombs were in Rise but I barely used them)
I liked how in the hardest difficulties (I completed it in "one with the jungle) there is no white paint in the climbable objects. This has caused me to get stuck more than a few times, sometimes REALLY hard, especially when the jump+grab were a bit buggy, which made me think I was going the wrong way more than once. But overall, it made it a lot more enjoyable than having white paint marking the obvious path. Especially figuring out puzzles. I was so close to google some of the puzzles, ended up having to do it for one, Thirsty Gods (or something like that), it didn't click at all, as well as the one with the poison and spinning tower, which I ended up brute forcing before reading the answer anyways lol.
The shooting/gunplay felt worse than Rise, somehow. I was always out of bullets, headshots were very annoying to land, most enemies have helmets, bows are all terrible. Melee was also pretty bad. So I went with stealth whenever possible, maybe that was the point?
I saw they made Score Attack more bearable compared to Rise, but I still think that mode is terrible.
The levels/maps were very cool, they looked amazing, a huge improvement over Rise, but while they were cool, they were very annoying to backtrack to get stuff you missed... especially those damn caches.
One more thing before talking about the story... Why was this the 2nd game in a row where we can't turn a flashlight on and off but in the first one we could pop a torch out of nowhere? We literally have a flashlight attached to our chest the entire time on this one, even when wearing the special disguises.
(STORY SPOILERS) The story was a bit ridiculous. And I liked Dominguez, unlike most people I've seen online, I think he made sense as a villain, definitely better than Konstantin. I haven't played the original games, so Idk how much magic is actually present in this universe, but I was expecting MOST of the magic stuff to have some kind of actual explanation, like Lara says over and over in the previous 2 games, while, obviously, having some fantasy here and there (like the Divine Source or the Queen thing in the first one). It left me a bit confused in the sense that I was expecting something a bit more serious. I finished the game thinking "really? That's how it actually played out?" But I guess if there's a ghost lady that can control the weather in an island, or the 2nd coming of definitely-not-Jesus, there could easily be some gods or whatever that can create tsunamis, break the ground in half, make volcanos erupt and... make an eclipse out of nowhere (?)
