I played Rise for free and it felt like it was trending in the right direction at least, there was a bigger emphasis on exploration and solving side-tombs. Honestly, the combat is a lot of fun in those games, but that series turned Lara into Rambo and I just didn't like that. I want my classic backflip, dual-wielding, British bombshell and my gritty, realistic, neck-stabber to be separate characters and I.P.
The tombs were really well done in Rise, I like how they seemed to have gone with a "theme park ride" design mindset, the entrances kind of felt like you were getting in a queue, the experience of solving the tomb kind of felt like a ride and then you exited back out onto the hub.
In addition to that, a lot of the environments had a real "movie set" feel like the gulag, it just had a neat level of detail that gave you plenty of interesting things to look at beyond a more typical game environment with a lot of copy and paste.
As for Lara herself, yes she spends most of the game wearing winter clothing (which makes sense) and her personality could be a bit grating at times, but you still got a good look at her still somewhat prominent behind when swimming underwater.
I even enjoyed the DLC episode where you explore Croft manor even though it was basically "Gone Home meets Tomb Raider" but again everything was well designed enough to make the experience interesting.
Everything was still ok in 2015, but there was a steep decline post 2016, I was originally excited when I heard about Shadow's setting since as well done as it was, I had mixed thoughts on Rise's setting theme wise and south American jungle sounded like a perfect setting, but they really ugged Lara up a lot for it.
I'm still kind of curious about it but they ruined what little appeal that version of Lara had.
