WHATS IN THE TOMB THIS TIME?

- It's pretty obvious playing Underworld that developer Crystal Dynamics is determined to adhere to the grand traditions of the Tomb Raider design. No, I'm not talking about Lara's short shorts (although they're certainly one of them). I'm not talking about the raiding of tombs (although there's plenty of that – now featuring the sport of 'ancient vase kicking'). I'm not even talking about treating impossibly elaborate archaic mechanisms as a personal jungle gym.

Nope, I'm talking about wildlife shootin'. Within five minutes you've killed a couple of Great Whites, then within hours you've moved on to black panthers, by way of spiders, bats, skeleton dogs, giant monitors and tigers. Tigers for god's sake! It just wouldn't be Tomb Raider if you weren't indiscriminately killing things that are on the verge of extinction. Bravo Crystal Dynamics!

The question is, however - is there a correlation between the number of nearly-extinct (or extinct –T-Rex's haven't been brought back yet, right?) creatures you get to kill in a Tomb Raider game and its quality? Angel of Darkness, after all, featured close to [MEMORY NOT FOUND]. Oh, bugger, that's right. Sorry folks, I forgot (ha!) that I had all memories of that game surgically removed from my brain. All I have is a vague recollection of eating chocolate bars off the ground in the sewers of Paris. Shame, because if Angel of Darkness didn't let Lara drain the bile from Asiatic black bears or club snow leopards to death, then we could have established a correlation. Guess you'll have to let me know in the comments.

Kill it real good Lara!

In any case, killing stuff is probably a pretty good place to start with in Underworld because the combat is by far the worst aspect of the game, so we might as well get it out of the way early. Frankly, we're not sure what Crystal Dynamics was thinking. Combat is completely mindless, with a stand and deliver mentality that's about as pertinent to modern videogames as the printing press is to the Internet. Taking cover? That's for pussies. Real gunfights consist of standing in the open, shooting at your enemies as fast as you can, while hoping your health bar is longer than theirs. Fancy flips and rolls while shooting are optional.

Put simply, gunfights are nothing but filler in this game, with no effort made to make them interesting. Half the time you're being assaulted by creatures that pose no actual threat – bats, spiders and the like. Just spam the trigger as fast as you can and the auto-aim will take care of the rest. Humans are a little trickier – not because they display any more intelligence, but because they take longer to kill and can shoot back. Dastards! As mentioned, you can't take cover, so the only real tactical options you have are lobbing sticky grenades at them, trying to get up close for a melee attack or using your – essentially superfluous - adrenaline metre. And then there are the enemies that fall into the 'beasts' category. These creatures can't shoot back, of course, but tigers and giant monitors can run at you and pounce, so you wind up jumping around like a jack in the box trying to avoid them while shooting. Or you wind up dropping something big and heavy onto their head, as in the case of the

giant squid. Blind I tells ya! With the auto-aim the combat really does take close to zero skill. And I just have to say it again – why are we killing tigers? Couldn't they be robot tigers or something? Or, hell, crippled, sad-faced orphans would be better.

About the best thing we can say about the combat is at least the game doesn't focus on it too much. Aside from the throw-away enemies (spiders et al.), you're not going to be killing things all that often. That's still no excuse for the quality of the combat experience, however, especially when compared to New School Tomb Raider, aka Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, which, although having a mite

combat for our liking, was at least thoroughly modern in approach.

So that's the worst part of the game. No prizes for guessing what's the best. Yes, it's the environmental puzzle solving, the traditional strength of the series. Underworld sees Lara roaming all over the world, from the hypnotic deep sea opening to Thailand, Southern Mexico and beyond. In each location, massive ancient structures beckon to be deciphered and conquered, and it's an absolute pleasure entering each new area, and exploring its mysteries.

Not pictured, the Norse ruins underneath the Thai ones. What a crazy world!

There's nothing all that new here in puzzle terms – you'll be placing concrete blocks on pressure pads to open doors, shifting mirrors to reflect focused beams of light, moving stone bridges in order to access alternate doorways, manipulating shadows to match patterns on stained glass windows, that sort of thing. It's all good stuff, however, and while never requiring any real brain power to solve, is still innately satisfying. It's one thing that Tomb Raider has always done well – encouraging the player to survey the environment, to look for things to interact with, to gradually unravel how to get around and open the way forward. The reason it's so satisfying is that you work out the pieces of the puzzles in chunks, with momentary pauses in between where you're looking around wondering what to do next before it clicks. And it almost invariably clicks in a timely fashion… with an exception or two.

The areas the design falls down are when the game breaks its own rules. For instance, the team has shoehorned bike riding (yes, again, but it's not as bad this time) into the Southern Mexico level, and what that means is that rather than having a self contained area, where everything you need to do is located within that one spot, it's spread out here in order to force you to use the bike to get from location to location. What this means is that you'll find yourself at the main temple, on a raised platform at one end, a big field with stone ruins in the middle, and an identical platform at the other end. You'll solve the puzzle at your end, which makes the central area change. Now, given the way previous levels have worked, one would imagine that you'd climb down somehow, cross the middle section, then scale up to the platform on the opposite end. There is, in fact, no good reason why you can't and you'll probably spend some time trying to work out how you're meant to do this. What you don't realise, however, is you're not meant to do it this way. You're meant to go back out the way you came in, hop on your bike and drive around to the other side. Now, that's fine, but it flies in the face of the previous levels, so the play experience isn't as smooth as it should be.