I've always loved the Tomb Raider sequence, but there aren't many great games in this series by precedent. Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light is a platform game that could have nothing to do with Tomb Raider. But Crystal Dynamics specifically deals with Tomb Raider (the final 10 years), so it has every right to use Lara Croft specifically as a hero.
What goals were pursued in the development of Guardian of Light - I do not know. Maybe they wanted to dilute the series with something different, not like the main games (not races), maybe a change of genre came in handy for part of the Crystal Dynamics team so as not to burn out at work, maybe something else. According to the precedent, a fairly benign video game was released, which, when passing, forces you to remember not so many Tomb Raiders (in this sense, everything is very stretched), but the platform games of the 90s. At the same time, which ones specifically - I didn’t manage to understand what was what, but I liked it in every variant.
It may seem to me at first glance that the main mistake of those who did not like the video game is an attempt to master it in 1-2 evenings. This is redundant. Still, we have a platformer in front of us, and the duration for a platformer is not so tiny (from 6 hours of pure gameplay - there are actually no screensavers here). I went through the video game in portions - it was successfully divided into 1.5 10 levels, any of which takes 30-40 minutes, if not to sprint, but to guess more local simple tasks. As a result, I spent a certain number of months on the passage and remained happy.
