The story and atmosphere are decent but not great. Most of the gameplay is puzzle platforming. This sometimes gets a bit repetitive, but there is enough variation and cutscenes to prevent it from getting too tedious. The balance between platforming and other types of gameplay is better than in TR-Anniversary (which was all platforming) but maybe not quite as engaging for the masses (and me) as the 2013 reboot (which had more action). The platforming difficulty is generally good for most of us, but on the easy side for hardcore gamers. I struggled with some parts, but always got through after a while. Some environments look really nice (Thailand), but others have rather bare and bland level design. The combat is fairly bad, as expected with this series. The checkpoint save system is also annoying, but not too bad.
Though some of the veterans will scoff, I find the optional "field assistance" hints an improvement over the previous games that offered no help at all - now I am less likely to need to look up solutions online when I get stuck. There is still big room for improvement in this area though. At least there are difficulty settings for specific things like enemy health and fall damage.
Lara's controls are a bit mixed. In some ways they are fine, but they also feel a bit nervous and she moves less natural (less inertia and animation flow) than in TR-Anniversary. As usual, sometimes the controls don't do what you want, causing many accidental deaths. Also, the camera behaviour can be disorienting, and the FOV is unpleasantly low. At least there is no mouse acceleration. The HUD is bad - you have to open your PDA to change weapon and see how much ammo you have. None of these flaws are game breaking though.
Tip: To improve the graphics beyond the max ingame settings, i suggest forcing AF to x4 (ingame AF setting does not work) and AA transparency to 4x supersampling in nvidia control panel.
I would say this is a game to get when on sale, and only if you are OK with a lot of puzzle platforming.
