Shadow of the Tomb Raider

Tomb Raider had some cinematic moments in the original game, and I think that's something that they've focused on being the core part of their game excitement.  Running along a dock as explosions are happening around you, jumping from log to log as you race down a river torrent, blast up a ramp and slow-mo over a catwalk on your jetski.   

Shadow of the Tomb Raider had some of that which was well done, but it also had a lot of monotonous pseudo-gameplay as well.  Like -- push forward on the stick so you can climb up a hole, but you just hold it down for the 10 second struggle up and out as things are collapsing around you.

It also suffers from that Tomb Raider'ish problem of severe rails and only one pathway, so if you can't understand what they're trying to present as a puzzle, you could be stumped.  This happened a few times with a "scrambling up" mechanic, kind of like a double jump up a wall.  I got stumped when the only way out was to jump across a gap and scramble up the far cliff, because the physics of it is absurd and there is a different key for holding onto the ledge that I was just a little bit short of and feeling like I was making bad jumps.  Nope - just bad design.

Story was ... nothing amazing?  Run of the mill Lara trying to keep the "object" out of the hands of the "agency", where she is always one step ahead but "agency" resources end up getting the "object" anyway -- cue final battle.

Nice looking game, seemless cutscenes and area transitions, the joke 20 some years ago was "how many poly's they used on Lara's boobs" -- I think more poly's might have been spent elsewhere.  I believe the kids nowadays refer to this as a high poly badonkadonk.