Game Discussion of the Week: Tomb Raider 2

I've only started playing this game, and I only have some impressions for it. I'm basically doing the same thing here as in the original Tomb Raider thread with my progression stated all throughout. First off: The controls have been improved a lot upon. It's so smooth now compared to the original. The difficulty on the other hand, it's like it just followed the previous level (being the last level of the first game). It's unforgiving as fuck. It took me 6 restarts before I found out I could save at any point in this game. I was looking for save crystals like a maniac because I would get a little farther each death. I found out I could save by sheer accident when I managed to glitch myself into a wall and I had to manually reset. The first level is damn hard and very unlike any other first levels of other games. It has all sorts of instant death traps such as rolling boulders, spikes and cliffs. The first game had mostly soft traps in the first levels (meaning jumps over pools of water, where you won't be instantly killed by failure etc.). So far I've managed to get to level 3, and there are a lot of bad guys with guns. In the first game these shooting goons were restricted to as boss battles and Pierre encounters, here they just drain all of my health packs as they're just your everyday enemy. I don't enjoy fighting them as much. At least they drop items, which brings me to another point. The way that secrets work in this game is worse for people like me, who's not looking up walkthroughs. If I don't find all the 3 secrets in a level I get nothing compared to the first game where I at least got a little bit for each secret that I found. Overall, I'm still having a blast with this game, even though it's kicking my ass.

A bit inferior to the first in some regards, but still one hell of a game. As Balder pointed out, it also has one of the hardest and most memorable first levels ever - it was really made for people who had already finished the first game.