Rise of the Tomb Raider / YMMV

Anti-Climax Boss: The final boss battle is very straightforward (throw things at the boss to stun him, melee attack when prompted), and is probably easier than most of the multi-opponent battles you fight along the way.
Ass Pull: It was always Trinity behind everything. All the strange things happening in history? Trinity! Unresolved and weird discoveries about the past? Trinity botched cover-up jobs! Lord Croft having issues with other academicians? Trinity-backed conspiracy! Her father's suicide? Trinity murder! Lara ending on Yamatai? Trinity! Ana, the would-be-stepmom? Trinity agent all those years! Lara killing roughly 400 of their men, including few high-rankers, and twice as many mercs, destroying multi-million operation and tons of equipment? Trinity is still out there unscratched, waiting with their vile schemes. The whole thing looks almost like Templars/Abstergo type of deal, only without any build-up leading to it.
Best Boss Ever: The final boss of the "Temple of the Witch" DLC is a long, multi-stage fight that combines elements of Platform Battle, Puzzle Boss, and Flunky Boss, set in a seriously screwy hallucinatory shrine thanks to the toxic pollen in the Wicked Vale. Baba Yaga flies above you in her cauldron, lobbing fireballs at you, while you get swarmed by her henchmen, demonic wolves and barbarian warriors with deer skulls for heads.
Captain Obvious Reveal:
- Jacob being the Prophet might have been a surprise had he not looked like every Western portrayal of Jesus. This also would have been the case if there hadn't been a large prominent statue of the Prophet that looked exactly like him... which the player must walk by, forcing them to look it.
- Ana turning out to be a villain, when all prior cutscenes had featured her acting suspiciously around Lara and discouraging her from pursuing her investigation. Made even more egregious by the first cutscene in which she appears, where she turns up right outside of Lara's flat in the dead of night, right after the someone had been in there (known to the player, but only suspected by Lara) and fled moments before Lara entered.
- The whole Baba Yaga sequence is not only a pollen-based hallucination, but that Baba Yaga is also Nadia's missing grandmother.
Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
- While not exactly a Game-Breaker, the Siberian Ranger outfit provides a unique bonus — increasing the capacity for all special ammunition — that's too good to ignore or change for something else. And it looks quite good, too.
- In PC version, where you have mouse for aiming, combat is just trivial once you equip your pistol with a silencer (which happens less than a quarter way in the game). Every unarmoured enemy goes down from a single bullet to the head, regardless of the stopping power of the gun. Every armoured enemy goes down from two bullets, the first piercing their helmet, the second killing them. For a vast majority of the game, this means taking down countless enemies without alarming anyone, all with One-Hit Kill, while having a silent gun that can easily perform several kills in very quick succession.
- Melee against the Deathless, especially the non-archer variety, carrying swords, shields and halberds. Rather than wasting hard to resupply bullets or being bothered with their armour, bum-rush them with icepicks and flail them like a madman. And the higher the difficulty is set, the more effective this is, allowing effortless One-Hit Kills.
Funny Moments: In the Season of the Witch DLC, the start of it sees Lara rescue Nadia from Trinity, and after Lara defeats them, she goes to open the locker where Nadia was hiding, where she pulls a gun on Lara, who quickly notes that her gun wasn't loaded. And then Nadia admits the gun doesn't work in the first place.
Game-Breaker:
- Poison Arrows. They are the first trick arrow you get, their materials are commonplace and they one-shot everything (except bears) with a generous splash-area which can be upgraded even further.
- Explosive Arrows take it a step further with upgrades: after an initial explosion, they release a cluster of small explosives, affecting a wide area. This has enough stopping power to one-shot an entire group of enemies immune to Poison Arrows.
- The Military Rifle, while being the textbook example of Boring, but Practical, shows up very early in the game as one of the few items sold by the smuggler. It's the most balanced weapon of its class and has some of the best stopping power in the entire game. It might not have overly good stats initially, but it also lacks any drawbacks and only gets stronger as the game progress.
- The Grim Whisper. All the benefits of the Ancient Horn Bow, plus more damage than the Recurve Bow (assuming both have been fully upgraded). The Recurve Bow has a much longer hold time, but with both of the skills that increase hold time you can hold the Grim Whisper for far longer than you'll ever need to anyway.
Good Bad Bugs: In areas with hostiles, the game awards experience for two distinctive behaviours: either you kill everything that moves, with varied amount of experience depending on your fitness and creativity, or a fixed amount of experience equal to maximum combat experience if you simply sneak past without being noticed. Aside from obvious game-logic abuse (sneak past, get exp, then turn back and gun everyone down), the actual bug is when you stealthily kill everyone in such a way nobody gets alarmed at any point. Upon the final kill, the game will declare the area was passed stealthy, awarding experience for non-lethal approach, despite getting the maximum, possibly chained experience for whole lot of stealth kills and headshots.
Informed Wrongness: The story ends with the note that immortality is inherently evil because...well, it just is, okay? To make the message extra hollow, the only immortal in the story is also Incorruptible Pure Pureness.
It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: A common criticism some people have of the game is that it hasn't innovated much from 2013, and follows the same gameplay pattern: Uncharted-style QTEs and setpieces, cover-based combat, and platforming. The plot elements are also suspiciously similar, almost overflowing with Suspiciously Similar Substitutes, with religious remnants, an undead army guarding the final dungeon, and all of Lara's personal issues going into recycle. What makes it all worse is Lara's characterisation being stuck, with almost no lessons learned from the previous game, making her act just as rash and irrational as in her first adventure. The fact that the game continues to treat itself deadly serious despite all the crazy plot elements doesn't help at all.
Narm: The final fight against Konstantin. You're stripped of your weapons bar your climbing ax and you're forced to scrounge around to make grenades to stagger him. The problem here is that there's nothing really stopping you from whaling away at him. What pushes this into narm territory is that he doesn't take any damage at all from your swings and his dialogue implies that you're scared, hiding, and running around looking for scrap instead of beating him up in melee.
Nightmare Fuel:
- The nightmarishly large European bear that has it out for you early on at the start of the game.
- A lot of the Temple of the Witch DLC storyline qualifies.
- Lara's first experience with Greek Fire involves traversing a narrow corridor 'decorated' with a squad of Trinity soldiers who were burned alive just moments before. One is still clinging to life and begs to make it quick when you aim your gun at him.
Older Than They Think: This is not the first time that a Tomb Raider sequel became a console exclusive on one platform; emphasis on console.^note
Polished Port:
- The Xbox 360 game has comparable visuals to its next-generation counterpart. Lighting, effects, and texture quality are all exceptional for a system that was entering its tenth year on the market (and is known to be less powerful than the PlayStation 3 at that) at the time of its release. Plus the game fits on a single dual-layer DVD disc when several games such as Halo 4 had to be shipped on two discs. About the only real compromise they had to make is the cutscenes are prerendered as opposed to in-engine (and even then that may have been for reasons other than system limitations). Definitely a commendable effort at a time when games such as Call of Duty: Black Ops III were cutting corners on their "last-gen" versions.
- The Linux port of the game uses Vulkan to its fullest, and Feral Interactive really outdid themselves, as the game only has about a 10% performance penalty compared to it's Windows counterpart.
Status Quo Is God: Lara is yet again underprepared for her adventures and yet again drags a helpless friend on her journey. She still acts with the naivety of a child. And this is after all the nightmarish experiences of the previous game and a lot of stuff going on in the Interquel comics.
That One Puzzle: The exceptionally unintuitive document in the Baba Yaga mission / "Wicked Vale" area that requires precision platforming and very strict timing to reach.
They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
- A lot of fans hoped the game would explore the consequences of giving a badass female protagonist a female love interest. Sam got sidelined in the interquel comics.
- The scenes with the therapist in the trailer looked like Lara would be combating PTSD, evolving the narrative into more of Spec Ops: The Line with an Action Girl protagonist which the previous game fell short of. Alas, what the fans interpreted as PTSD was "restlessness to get back into action", as Word of God put it.
Visual Effects of Awesome: The console versions now have the strands in Lara's ponytail individually modeled and reacting independently to physics rather than being a single clump, essentially using the Nvidia Hairworks feature from the PC port/Definitive Edition of the 2013 game (the PC version of course has it as well).
Win Back the Crowd:
- After receiving backlash for initially announcing that Rise of the Tomb Raider would be exclusive to Xbox platforms, Square Enix announced on July 23, 2015 that the game would be released for the PlayStation 4 and PC in 2016.
- There are more tombs, ancient ruins and elaborate puzzles than in the last game, as if the developers wanted to address fan issues over their absence.

YMMV / Rise of the Tomb Raider

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