I've only finished the first one, but I'm keeping a very close eye on the second one.
The second one turned out to be worse than the first. Their lead designer Chris Avellone got "Me to"ed mid development and got booted (He was later proven inocent, but it was to late), and then his abscenced showed up in the final product and the deferences and missing futures with the earlier trailers. It tried to go for a modern medieval age look, but whithout their lead designer they didn't know how to implement that feeling properly, and the final product ended up looking more cartoony, a bit unfinished and generally worse than the first one.
All the recent updates tried to make the game look and feel more like the first one, slowlly adding missing futures such as finishers, make the nighttime hard again by re-introducing roaming volatiles, ironning out bugs, adding filter options that remove some of the cartoonishness, fixing/improving the parkoor, and with the most recent update, fixing many of the cartoony graphics (mostly the standard zombies), fixing some locations that where very copy-pasted (not all of them) and introducing firearms.
IMO it still needs some more time in the oven, and I'm not sure about some of the new futures:
- A whole zone from the inicial phase is still missing, and fans are trying to recreate it with mods.
- I'm skeptic about the re-introduction of fire-arms. In the first game, finding a single fire-arm was a big deal and it happens much later in the game. Besides, this game is supposed medieval themed and their absence are part of the game's theme, as they are supposed to be extinct. I expected them to introduce them ideally in some expansion, perhaps one that adds the third missing zone Elysium, where there could be a situations where you can find functioning fire arms, and be able to return with them to old areas, while keeping the melee theme in the early game.
- The ability to give nights the propper amount of darkness like the first game is hidden in the options behind filters. Otherwise the nights are very bright. That means that they are not designed to be played with the dark filter, nor you are getting any special achivement for playing on hard mode.
- The flashling is still shit.
- The night chace mini-game is still there.
- It feels they are trying to turn the game like the first when it was not intended to be.
- I don't care about the live service shit, like halloween and christmas content, or addon outfits from other games that take you out of the experience. I hated them in my complete edition DL1 where I oppened my inventory just to find a golden fucking gun, as much as I hated in the Tomb Rider Complete editions where Lara strugling to survive making a makeshift bow, just to find some add-on Uzi and 10 late game tribal outfits sitting in her stash.
Personaly, I'm waiting for a propper expansion to then get the complete edition.
