Rise of the Tomb Raider
Don't let the flashy presentation fool you, this game is about as shallow as a puddle and lacks any kind of individual identity. You can almost see the game design and creative decisions being made as you progress through the story.
"Oh it needs to have set pieces like Uncharted!" "It needs an XP system like CoD!" "Kids like Skyrim right? Make it snowy, and then have a marshland forest area with a medieval looking village!" "It needs to have open world sections!" "It needs to have supernatural elements, but also a shady PMC, who are also being run out of the Vatican, and there are hints about aliens!" "We need to have the best performance capture systems available, despite having awful actors and a worse script!" "Can we crowbar cards in here somehow?" "Give Lara the Assassin's Creed/Batman vision!"
The game is at its best when it's quiet, spooky, you're platforming, and you're solving puzzles. So when it's being like Tomb Raider, then. Simple, but fun. Unfortunately these sections are really only seen in the optional challenge tombs areas. Most of the time the game is just funneling you into bad shooting galleries or predictable "OH NO THE GROUND IS COLLAPSING YOU BETTER PRESS FORWARD AND JUMP OCCASIONALLY" sequences. The game has a formula and it sticks to it religiously.
The shooting is loose and lacks impact, the enemies are bullet sponges, the cover system is poor, and the level design is often baffling in how narrow and closed off environments are when faced with enemies who LOVE throwing grenades and charging at you with reckless abandon. The story is trash, the characters are flimsy, the acting is surprisingly poor, and it just feels like a totally bloated, unfocused experience. It's competently made technically, but it just lacks a personality of its own and feels like a giant pastiche of every popular video game series of the last 5-10 years.
Rise of the Tomb Raider is the best example of AAA games becoming a homogeneous unidentifiable blob of the same ideas in barely different configurations.
**--- (2/5)