Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light

Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light is a isometric action-adventure puzzle game. The story involves Lara finding an ancient Mayan artifact, the Mirror of Smoke, which releases Xolotl, an evil spirit bent on destroying the world, as well as Totec, the titular Guardian of Light. Lara and Totec team up to track down Xolotl and save the world. The plot is pretty basic because the focus is on gameplay, where the game delivers on its promise of a fun co-op adventure.

This is a two-player co-op game, with one player controlling Lara and the other Totec. The game is split into levels, and you’ll encounter two main types of obstacles: combat and puzzles. 

Combat is relatively simple. It’s a twin-stick shooter: move with the left stick and aim with the right stick (holding down a button to shoot). There’s also a dodge-roll, jump, and bombs for good measure. Most encounters are against hordes of weak enemies, although you do sometimes need to deal with elite mobs and even the occasional boss. 

As the game progresses you’ll unlock relics and artifacts to buff yourself as well as additional guns. This lets you customize your playstyle and keeps things fresh. If a character dies then they can be revived by their teammate, or on their own after three seconds. You only reach a “game over” if both characters die so it’s a pretty lenient system, which I appreciate because, despite the dire stakes of the story, the game feels like it’s meant to be an adventure, not a Souls-like slog. 

The combat is functional and provides a nice change of pace between puzzles and platforming, which I found to be the main core of the game. While Lara and Totec are identical in combat (other than their default weapons), they have different abilities for puzzles: Totec can block projectiles with his shield and can create platforms for Lara (with his shield or by throwing spears into the wall), while Lara can use those platforms and has a grappling hook. The puzzle design is great, forcing you to think creatively and use your limited toolset in a variety of ways over the course of the game. The puzzles hit the right balance between obvious and esoteric. There were even a few places we felt like we were able to use the game’s tools to bypass the intended progression, and it always feels great to think you beat the developers at their own game. 

There were a few bugs and technical issues—for instance, one session my friend could only use his default weapon, and another time we were trying to reach the top of a crumbling staircase and failed… but I didn’t actually fall, so I was able to simply walk up the (now-invisible) staircase with no time pressure—but the auto-save was robust enough that we never lost any progress, so no serious complaints here. 

And… I don’t have much more to say on the game. The story is basically an excuse plot, which doesn’t warrant much discussion, and the gameplay is solid for the length of the game, but not extraordinarily deep. Each level has “challenges” (such as winning within a time limit) you can complete for a bonus, and while the game is fun to beat once, it’s not something that feels like it deserves any of my attention beyond that. Still, if puzzle-platforming-combat with a friend sounds fun to you, I definitely recommend checking out Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light.