/vr/ - Retro Games

>>3470860

First game has a better sense of isolation and exploration since you spend roughly 100% of the game in abandoned ruins/tombs with very little combat. You could go for extremely long stretches of time without finding any enemies, just looking around the level and making sure not to run into traps or trying to figure out how to climb to a specific part.

Second game has better mechanics and some of the additions (dynamic lighting/flares) were a nice way to bump up the atmosphere, even though darkness was totally abused in some levels.

The biggest downside to the second game is that the devs realized that you could cheese your way through most of the combat in TR1 by standing on top of something and just peppering whatever animals were nearby with infinite pistol shots, so they decided to add a shitton of bullet sponge human enemies with ranged weapons to the sequel. TR2 was a great game but it seriously went overboard with the combat.

The huge levels (without automaps or objective markers) and long puzzle segments in the early Tomb Raider games were great, you actually had to explore the areas you were in instead of just relying on a linear "as long as I kill enough enemies and keep moving forward the game will funnel me into the next setpiece" like the modern Tomb Raiders do. I wish we'd get a classic Tomb Raider style game, but it will never happen. Even Anniversary had to throw in a bunch of dumb shit like wallrunning and the "adrenaline system" that turned the most memorable fights of the game into QTE battles.