Reviews// Tomb Raider: Underworld (PS3)

In my review of Lara Croft Tomb Raider: Legend in April of 2006, I likened that game to Batman Begins. It was a reboot, a starting from scratch, paired down, highly focused attempt to re-invigorate a game series that had become tired, formulaic and, in latter games, ridiculed for getting it very wrong. And, just like Mr Bale's take on the caped crusader, Legend delivered. Sure it tweaked Lara's history a bit, aligning her more with her celluloid counterpart, but it took the game-play back to the essential heart of the first Tomb Raider game.

A year later, Lara Croft Tomb Raider: Anniversary enabled us to revisit Lara's first adventure with all of the lovely bells and whistles that the Legend game engine brought to the party. To me, this felt like an attempt to tie the old back to the new and bring Lara's past adventures into line with the revised history established in Legend. It effectively opened the way for a larger story to be told, the story of Lara's life in adventure. It retrospectively set the scene for Legend and for the games to follow.

Now we come to Tomb Raider: Underworld. Note the dropping of Lara's name from the title, another Hollywood-influenced flourish that made the full names of the games quite laborious to type. Underworld continues the story started in Legend of Lara's quest to find out what happened to her mother years earlier in the Himalayas after a plane crash stranded them both in an ancient temple.

At the end of Legend, Lara's old friend now enemy, Amanda told her that her mother had been transported to Avalon, the underworld of Arthurian legend. Now in Underworld, after a brief in media res sequence, acting as a training level, and showing the aftermath of the explosion in Croft Manor we saw in the teaser trailer we find Lara in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea over a spot she thinks may be the entrance to Avalon.

We then join Lara on another globe-totting adventure as she uncovers the mysteries of an older mythology that seems to tie together Arthurian legend, a Hindu temple in Thailand and Mayan structures in Mexico with the tales of the Norse gods. Along the way she will re-encounter Amanda and her mercenaries as well as a much older enemy from her more distant past.

To be honest, I'm not really sure why I'm being circumspect in that last paragraph, Eidos have given the game away in their trailers already. However, I feel I should do something to prevent myself from spoiling the story for those of you who may have avoided any clues thus far.

So that's the story then, but what about the game-play? Well, if you have to ask that about a Tomb Raider game, you must not have played very many previously. As is typical, you must guide Lara from the start of the level to the end by solving various environmental puzzles, avoiding a few traps, climbing on, under and over parts of the scenery, going for a quick swim and defending yourself from random animals and nefarious humans. Business as usual for our Ms Croft.