Combat hasn't changed much since
Legend, the most notable difference is the absence of environmental weaponry that used to be triggered by the triangle button. Now we have pieces of the environment that are highlighted in a similar way to enemies, but are used as switches to activate some long forgotten machinery.
Enemies are back to being the wandering animals of the first game (
Tomb Raider), stopping Lara from being the mass murderess that she became between
Tomb Raider II and
Legend. Instead she goes back to happily killing endangered species such as lions, tigers, bears and the afore-mentioned wolves.
In some combat situations you will find the screen blurs when one of your antagonists rushes at you. You then have a short time to perform a dodge move, usually this move will also allow you to get a critical headshot in with your weapons as the enemy rushes past.
These sequences are a bit of a development of the "interactive cut-scene" sections of
Legend except that they actually work quite a bit better since they are more integrated with the game.
Speaking of the button-mashing "interactive cut scene" (BMICS) play mechanic, it's back and it's just as bad as before. One of the earliest uses of this mechanic is in the Lost Valley level of Peru when you encounter the Tyrannosaurus Rex. Ol' Rexie is preceded on screen by a few raptors, resplendent in their up-to-date feathered head plumage, which are running away from the big guy.
A horrified Lara is caught up in the stampede and must avoid the jaws of death attached to the larger dinosaur, as well as the attentions of the raptors. The actual battle against the T-Rex is a simple affair of making him injure himself while avoiding being eaten. The coup-de-grace is delivered by another BMICS sequence that sees the old boy run into a temple and kill himself with falling masonry.
The previous action sequences are presented as a strictly linear process that must be accomplished successfully or you go back to the start. Because of this, it is a much more frustrating experience than in the original game where you had to avoid the T-Rex as a normal (if large) enemy and keep blasting away until it died.
Killing the T-Rex in
Tomb Raider was a "Hell, yeah!" punch-the-air type of moment, in
Anniversary it's more of a "thank goodness that's over with" moment - and that's a shame.
This is a trend that continues with a lot of the boss battles in the game. It's as if you aren't fighting the bad guys at all, but are trying to figure out a puzzle while being attacked. The fight with the mummy centaurs outside of the Tomb of Tihocan in Greece was especially frustrating to play, I died about 10 times before I hit on the trick to taking them out. And no, I won't tell you what the trick is, wait until we have a walk-through up or pay for an expensive printed, dead-tree, resource-sapping, world-hating guide or maybe just figure it out yourself. I had to!