After finishing the first game, I moved onto the 2 with tr2main and frankly, not a fan. The human enemies just don't work for the game, and the lack of tombs until the latter half makes it feel off to me. Puzzles are still good to great, but the enemies just ruin the flow to me. I'll finish it eventually I'm sure, but for a break from the formula, I switched to TR2013.
Holy shit, 2013 is the definition of bland. It's not even that it's aping other games, it's just poorly done. I can't fathom how they were able to make a mystical storm island off the coast of Japan look so fucking boring. Whose idea was that? Who thought that having a giant town of metal sheeting be half the game was a good idea? The first bits aren't terrible, when you're in the forests and actually seeing some things that resemble "tombs", but the latter half of the game is trash.
The enemies don't move logically at all. I get that they want to make them harder to hit and not stand there like statues, but the way they twitch around is insanely unnatural and still doesn't make them difficult to hit. Almost every enemy could be headshot without them popping out because their heads stick over the tops of almost every wall. There isn't a single challenging fight in the whole game, and that's honestly a blessing because it's so bland that it's not worth playing.
I skipped every cutscene, there was no way in hell I was going to watch 7.5 hours of them. That's more than the gameplay runtime.
Now for the part that people might not agree with. I jumped into Rise immediately after, turned it to the highest difficulty, turned off all the magic Batman sense shit, and this game is about what I would imagine a modern version of the first game should be. It's not all tombs, which honestly would be the best way to approach these games, but it's atmospheric, actually has real fucking puzzles, and Lara doesn't IMMEDIATELY tell you how to solve every puzzle while talking to herself. I know the first one is generic trash, but if you haven't tried Rise, at least give it a chance. My expectations were very low, but I'm thoroughly enjoying it so far.
My only niggles are that even with hints turned off, it still decides randomly to remind you how to climb walls after you've climbed walls 50+ times. It'll randomly tell you to upgrade weapons at camps despite being 30% into the game. It's odd, but it's minor.