Tomb Raider (2013)

Note: This is for the 2013 game.

- Always try being stealthy. Even if you only stealth kill 2 or 3 guys, then when shit goes loud you are dealing with a group with a few less bad guys.

- Don't play it like a standard cover shooter, you're a lot better moving and shooting, and switching it up as often as you can. If you sit in one spot and just pop out to shoot at guys you'll get set on fire a lot.

- You don't need to grind every collectible unless you really want to or you need XP. If you do, look for treasure maps which help a lot in finding them.

- You can backtrack to most places to collect things you missed. Salvage is useful to collect, the weapon upgrades are pretty awesome.

- If you're playing on PC, the QTEs have a reputation for sometimes being a giant pain in the ass - though I think a recent patch made them less painful. Don't hammer as fast as you can, try matching what's on screen. Also, the shrinking circle QTE wants you to hit the button while the shrinking circle is *inside* the static circle.

- I can back up the worthlessness of the salvage from animals skill. There's a few wolves at the start as enemies but after that the whole hunting thing seems to be forgotten about and it's human enemies (mostly) all the way.

- Arrow retrieval might seem a bit useless as there is an abundance of arrows everywhere but it ties into a tier 2 skill which nets you extra ammo for looting corpses.

- Orienteering was quite useful as using survival instinct reveals nearby relics/documents etc on your map long before finding the treasure maps. Completing the relic sets nets you a good chunk of xp towards another upgrade too.

- Always be looting corpses and ammo caches as they randomly contain weapon parts to upgrade your weapons, and you can't develop them further until you find enough parts.

- It's actually not trivially easy to max out all your skills and weapon upgrades throughout the game, so picking the skills that give you more XP and resources whenever you get some early will come in handy.

- Along those lines, while you may get bored of looking for all the hidden challenge items, it does pay off to look for crates with resources in them. Use the special vision thingy (in fact, do this a lot in general because it's pretty handy) to spot them easily. Sometimes they're hanging in nets which you have to incinerate to fall down.

- Once you get the grenade launcher, make sure to make use of it. I ended up running around with grenades stocked to the limit most of the time and still ran into crates with new ones because I apparently used it far less than I was supposed to.

- Good way to find the hidden objects in each level is to think 'if I were a developer, and I wanted to hide something in the most out of the way place that no one would look, where would I place it?' Guaranteed you will find the last object in that spot.