Rise of the Tomb Raider is a clear improvement over Tomb Raider (2013) in almost every way possible. It's a fun and wild action adventure that takes you through enemy infested soviet installations to ice covered tombs filled with simple but enjoyable puzzles. Only this time around it really doubles down on the stealth portion of the game, which the game's predecessor was severely lacking. This time you really get the opportunity to go full Siberian predator on you enemies, as you silently jump from branch to branch among the trees in order to stalk your unsuspecting prey. It's rare to be able to clear out an entire area without being spotted, since the enemy sometimes seems to be hard coded to find you no matter what. But you still have a much better chance to at least level the playing field a bit before guns are needed.

The gunplay is more or less the same as the last one, with just the addition of some new weapons for you to choose from. But the new and improved animations makes the combat feel much more weighted and impactful. The enemies no longer goofily flail about like bouncing ragdolls when they die. Now they feel like actual objects with weight behind them. Sure, the physics and animation is not as well crafted as in for example Red Dead Redemption 2, but it's a giant step in the right direction.

While the gameplay is vastly improved, the story still falls a little bit short. The main difference in my opinion is the characters. The characters in the first game was as bland and tasteless as McDonald's food. In Rise of the Tomb Raider they are a bit more fleshed out, with motivations that are part personal and interesting, and part cliché and boring. The writers also learned how to explore the central themes of their own story this time, to some extent at least. Last time they tried to do this gritty story about the hardships of survival and the moral lines that has to be crossed, without ever contemplating about the ramifications of actually crossing those lines. This time they actually do contemplate the actions and overall goals of their quest, but it's all based on the same cliches that usually plague these types of archaeological action adventure stories with supernatural elements. As in they usually just end up with the same conclusion: the powerful and supernatural artifact, that we have spent the entire journey trying to find, is ultimately better off left hidden to save the world. It's an improvement over the last game's story, but it's still a story that we have heard a thousand times already. Thank the gods that the gameplay at least got a huge improvement.