Recent reviews by Arclight Phoenix

Great game. (I pre-purchased the Croft Edition to play 48 hours before).

From my current playthrough of the highest difficulty my experience has been positive.

They took the experience they got from making Tomb Raider and Rise of the Tomb Raider and added new features to compliment the player experience. Such as a town with NPCs and 'harder' puzzles in tombs.

A lot of the mechanics from the previous two games return, such as the stealth mechanic (which has also seen some jungle changes where you slather Lara in mud) and weapons are pretty much a copy and past from the previous two games.

The engine seems to be the same but with a totally new environment, the deep snow is now 'deep mud' and a lot of the environment triggers are recycled from the old two games.

The true gem that makes this game stand out more than the previous two is the heavy investment in the story this game shows. The plolish that they put into the story arc is 20x better than what they did for the previous two.

Overall it's a positive experience except for the one crash I had after reaching basecamp from a one hour long session that didn't save (The hardest difficulty doesn't save unless you reach basecamp but I crashed while activating the basecamp).

Fun when it works, horrible when it doesn't.

When you kill the boss and manage to extract it's pretty fun but after extraction getting 'your in game progress has been lost and you earned nothing' error is horrible.

pass the whisky

After playing 2 hours of this game as a completely new player (and reading guides about how to win as survivor) I must say this game has left really bad impressions on me.

At it's key, the mechanics are similar to Evolve, it is a 1v4 arena showdown. The first game was really fun, after the first few games, the novelty wore off and the horrible balancing issues this game has really shined through.

Playing as a new player survivor with other randoms is almost impossible to win, the game heavily favors the killer (some of you may say that is how the game is built but I will argue it is a fundamental design failure).

As a competitive game (which it has a mode for) it should be balanced, but tipping the balance in favour of the killer is therefore a contradiction of the design of a competitive game. In a perfectly balanced game both sides should have an EQUAL chance of winning and that is not the case in this game.

Take evolve for instance, a beginner of that game still has a good chance of winning any game they play because the monster is balanced towards the other 4 hunters. This game however, unless you have team coordinations and extremely good perks you cannot win.

For instance, playing as survivor, no matter what I did it always alerted the killer. Okay, so I go to hide? Well the killer can move freely and find me. Okay so I am caught? The timmer till you die in INFINATELY MORE FASTER THAN THE TIME IT TAKES TO SAVE YOU FROM ANOTHER SURVIVOR.

It seems you need more skill as a survivor than a killer which is really un-balanced

In a perfect world, new players going into this game should win at least one of the games they play (e.g. evolve) however, this game is completely not balanced for new players.

I think the developers really need to pull this game off the shelft or make it open beta, had I known this game to be this bad I would've never bought it.