Yes most of what you say is a matter of opinion and not really a valid counter point to what I'm saying, if you enjoy the game then awesome, I respect that, but pretty much everything you've stated just points at streamlining and dumbing down and being ok with it.
At the moment my opinion is that TR2013 is good, yours is that it is bad, how are we supposed to argue about that? But as I said, my point wasn't to prove you wrong anyway, at least not in your general opinion about the game, I just wanted to point out that story isn't the only thing you can like about it, because I also like pretty much everything else, whether you call it "streamlining" or "dumbing down" or whatever. (By the way, can someone explain to me what "streamlining" means? I've never heard that word outside this thread.)
I also have to disagree with what you said about me liking Legend, Underworld and Anniversary when they are the same as the reboot, because they aren't, not by a long shot, while I don't consider those 3 games to be great, I do think they're fairly good because Legend took what the first 3 games did right and reworked them pretty well, the platforming, gymnastic shooting, enemy variety, puzzles, vehicle segments etc
I was mostly talking about Legend when I compared it to the reboot, and let's face it: Legend is easy even on the highest difficulty, there's no exploration at all because the path is as straight as it can be, the QTEs and overload of cutscenes were introduced with this title, there are maybe three puzzles throughout the whole game and they aren't even hard with Zip and Alister or sometimes even Lara herself always giving away the solutions, the rest is about shooting generic human enemies (I don't know what "variety" you see in that department, there are four or five wild animals among the armies of soldiers, and that's it), and as if that wouldn't already make it easy enough, giant help windows that can't be switched off pop up every two minutes to tell you exactly what you need to do (if that's what you mean by "hand holding"). Yes, it's fun and it has some great platforming, but as I said before, it also has
everything you're criticising about the reboot, and it's so easy that even people who have never heard of videogames before shouldn't have any problems playing it. So if anything,
Legend is a "dumbed down" version of Tomb Raider, yet you enjoy that game, but not the more complex TR2013. How does that make sense? I mean, it doesn't
have to, you can't argue about taste, but still.
Tomb Raider 2013 was keyword here "marketed" as a game about survival, I saw all the marketing about "A Survivor is Born" and the Guide to Survival videos when the game itself has absolutely nothing survival related, again, apart from its story.
For example, the part near the beginning of the game where Lara finds the bow and then kills a deer for "food", after that pointless segment, you don't ever have to do that again the entire game, Lara never starves, never looses strength or anything, what was the point of that?
The point was to carefully introduce players to the new combat system and allow them to practice in a relatively safe environment before the real enemies come in. I know it was marketed differently, but since when do game developers actually keep their promises? Underworld, too, was supposed to have a number of features that didn't make it into the final game, where did they go? Never trust a trailer or the word of a developer, that's more or less an unspoken rule, and not just for Tomb Raider.