Recent reviews by pandamonium

If you wanted to marry Donald Trump and a space monkey, all the while having Coach from L4D2 and Shepard from Mass Effect being the best men, you could probably do it with this game.

10/10 would divorce again

Fun as a pastime. Still don't see how people can stomach playing this for thousands of hours tho, I admire your commitment.

Even though this game makes a lot of sexual comments and even has a NSFW version, I don't consider it to be sex-driven.
All the characters flirt with you at first, but down the path of their story you fall in love with their entire self. It's fascinating.
Gives it deeper meaning, I suppose.

Seriously, this game has a lot of nice stuff.
From a nice character customization to great writing, each character feels different than the next.
The music follows your journeys well, the two minigames are either very relaxing or very frustrating (seriously, that 2500+ Score achievement...) and the animation is so fluid!

Kudos to you, Team Amorous. Hoping for more updates. Maybe an extra character?

The jump in art style between the First/Second Encounter and this game is HUGE.
The Encounters focused on getting stuff bloody, while 2 is a little tamer. In comparison, the charm hasn't changed at all, though. You'll still find yourself having fun destroying waves of enemies to good soundtracks. For 2005, the graphics are pretty impressive. Characters are all modeled to be cartoony in one way or another, but the real eye candy is the backgrounds.

Hell, if SS4 gets the same cartoony treatment, I wouldn't be mad at all. Croteam proves that they have the guts to experiment.

Just don't be like me and expect that a few enemies is the end of a fight. I'm the type to get driven by story, but this franchise gets driven by soft bullet hell.

If you're a fan of the Core Design Tomb Raider games for the original PlayStation, you may want to try this game, but don't expect a perfect one. This game IS buggy, and the negative reviews are warranted.
It was released rushed and unfinished.

Twelve years ago when I first saw it, it was the most beautiful thing to come after the person who introduced me to gaming completed Chronicles, it felt like such an improvement in some elements but lacking in other.

It copies mechanics from previous titles, but some have to be unlocked later in the game, like sprinting. Gone are the times you'd have to wait for Lara to pull a block for exactly one square, because the game has none.
New mechanics include hand-to-hand fighting, faster swiming after swan diving, poison damage, sprint-jumping and commando crawling.

The most innovative mechanic this game got was the introduction of a Stamina bar, which depletes when Lara traverses ledges or hangs onto them. It's a neat mechanic, and it makes sense given the fact that she's rusty after being in recovery from escaping a pyramid.
The way the upgrades are handled, though? Not good. Pull this specific thing or kick open this specific door to get a strength upgrade, most of the time.

The soundtrack is the best thing in this game and follows the whole story fittingly.
It was recorded in an orchestral manner and sounds so dark, nostalgic and gloomy.

One thing I should mention: Do NOT attempt to use the Setup on your own. Google is your friend on this one, because the settings are confusing.
My suggestion is either using Google to find the best possible settings in the Setup, or relying on the ingame settings, which at least have normal drop-down menus scaled from None/Off to High, for example.

BONUS!
My recommendation is to use TexMod and the community made HD Graphics Mod, right here:
http://www.core-design.com/community_hdgraphicspatch.html

There are tons of other mods that fix inverted polygon problems, restore some cut content, unlock further widescreen support and control fixes. Of course, some character model mods exist as well. You could play the whole game as Janice if you really wanted to...

The first image you see when looking at this page is a beta training level,
accessible only by cheats. It was supposed to be to the right of the dog at the very
beginning of the game, but the door there is now locked. TRAOD: SCU gets you past
this barrier if you want to explore an unfinished thing with voice acting and some pickups.