Gard and co have taken a back-to-basics approach, assessing Tomb Raider's best aspects, so in Underworld you get huge, engrossing and epic puzzles that involve much leaping, swinging and climbing from Lara, a strong storyline, the usual shooting of endangered animals and rival treasure hunters, and no more. It's easy to detect the hand of Toby Gard, Lara's originator, who is now back in the fold at the game's San Francisco-based developer, Crystal Dynamics. The franchise is incredibly successful and changing it radically just for the sake of it could render it worthless.Īnd when you get stuck into Tomb Raider Underworld, it swiftly becomes clear that it is designed to appeal to a generation of gamers – surely now in their 30s – who grew up with Tomb Raider and fell in love with Lara's attributes and attitude. Looking at the game dispassionately, it would appear to lack a killer innovation, something that adds a new twist to the franchise. If anything, Lara's movement is the key aspect of Tomb Raider Underworld. And for the first time, Lara's movements are governed by motion capture, rather than hand animation, so she moves in a more deliciously gymnastic fashion than ever. Since it's the first Tomb Raider game designed for next-generation consoles from the outset, you'd expect it to look good, and it doesn't disappoint. Indeed, in her latest starring vehicle, Tomb Raider Underworld, Lara has never looked or moved better. However, one of Cool Britannia's standard bearers continues to beaver away, doing what she does as well as ever: Lara Croft. The Spice Girls are no more, Tony Blair is no longer one of the most powerful men in the world, and the country is generally too busy trying to scrape a living to bother about being cool.

Its standard bearers haven't fared too well.

The concept of Cool Britannia now seems laughable – a discredited chunk of spin from a previous century. Lara's acrobatics and cunning are pushed to their limits in elaborate, sprawling platform puzzles set among ancient tombs and ruins in the jungles of Mexico, the coast of Thailand, beneath the frigid arctic seas, and in other forbidden places of mystic power around the world. Lara is set on a quest to obtain the power of Mjöllnir, the hammer of the invincible Thor. In all, Lara's movement throughout the game incorporates over 2,000 animations. Motion-capture technology is used for the first time in the series, with the 3D recordings of a world-class gymnast bringing Lara's jumps, flips, and kicks to life. Following the franchise's legendary return to success under the direction of Crystal Dynamics, Underworld, the studio's sophomore production with Lara Croft, aims to maintain the high level of solid, free-flowing action that reinvigorated the series, while bringing back more of the spooky exploration and challenging jumping puzzles that helped define the classic Tomb Raider games of the late '90s.Developers strove to create a smooth-moving, contextually integrated character.

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