It depends on the game. Some visual novels let you have extensive amounts of control over what happens, while others are honestly completely linear. And the amount of "gameplay" varies too. You could call Phoenix Wright a visual novel technically, and there's definitely a lot of gameplay in there. Some VN games even throw in stat-raising elements.
Visual Novel Database has an extremely good tagging system. Here's the gameplay tags to give you an overview of what kind of gameplay VNs can have.
http://www.ftlgame.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=15663
Scroll down a bit. You need the Captains edition, the resource pack, and the infinite add-on. It adds a lot of extra weapons/encounters/etc. Good stuff.
I have played every Tomb Raider ever. I am a loving fan since that first tiger mauled my face.
The reboot was certainly a fun game and I loved playing it. But Skyrim (for example) has far more tomb raiding than Tomb Raider itself, know what I mean?
Also, it has no replayability. Beat it once and forget about it.
Personally I think the series have been declining since Tomb Raider IV: The Last Revelation.
I had some hope with Legend, Anniversary and Underworld but those were a bit too short and simple, but maybe that's just me.
EDIT: Also, it is worth mentioning the compatibility of Tomb Raider II on modern OSs. Just install and play. Tomb Raider III, IV and V need patches/updates/bug-fixes, and Tomb Raider I needs an emulator. Good thing Virtual Box exists; and a windows 98 cd isn't that hard to find :)
You could try this app Gamezop if you have an Android phone https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=co.gamezop&hl=en
They've got over a 100 games (quite like what you described) and that's all packed into a single app.
We just released a major update that should fix most of the issues everyone was having!
Hope you enjoy the game!