Malf on 23/11/2008 at 16:58

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I completed this yesterday, and I hate to say it, but I was somewhat disappointed.
What's there is good enough, but there's just not enough of it, and the camera, as stated numerous times before, just plain sucks. I died many, MANY times purely because of the camera. Not good.

The graphics and art design are fantastic, and the story that CD have been developing over the course of Legend & Anniversary comes to a nice end, although it went off in a completely different direction than I was expecting. I was a tad disappointed to see Natla return. It felt like a cheap way to get more out of the story.

But overall, it's just far too short, and the unlockables, or should I say complete lack thereof, mean the game has no longevity whatsoever.
There are 5 levels overall; granted each is quite long, but I was still expecting more, and the last level's a bit poor if I'm honest.
There's no Croft Mansion to explore either. Okay, so it gets blown up during the game, but I think the aftermath of that event would have made it even cooler to explore.
There's no cheats or costume unlocks either.
All there is is concept art and related material; no playable content whatsoever.

Oh, and to finish off, the combat is almost as bad as the camera. Even though they've added "Adrenaline" (almost a complete rip-off of Max Payne 2's bullet time system), it feels cliunky and uninspired, let alone frustrating when it sends wave after wave of baddies at you. Fortunately, once you get Thor's Hammer, combat becomes ridiculously easy and you don't have to worry about it. Unfortunately, that happens far too late in the game.
Besides which, I would have preferred a better combat system rather than that half-assed solution.
They could have learned a lot from Drake's Fortune here.

Overall advice?
Wait for it to hit budget.
I also suspect that the unlockables are absent because they hope to release that kind of stuff as premium DLC. They've already signed an exclusivity deal with MS for 360 DLC.
Finally, Eidos are trying to delay sites publishing their scores for the game so that scores won't affect sales. Make of that what you will.

Ostriig on 26/11/2008 at 15:00

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And unsurprisingly, (http://kotaku.com/5095674/eidos-trying-to-fix-tomb-raider-underworld-metacritic-scores) they took it back. Scroll down to the Update bit. All sarcasm aside, I think it's deplorable that we've come to the point where the target market of this industry is regarded as so jaded and incapable of producing serious repercussions that an employee of a professional PR company can afford to make such a major screw-up as blatantly confessing to trying to fix scores.

Renzatic on 27/11/2008 at 00:07

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Which is the reason why I still fire up the original PS1 TR on occasion. It had a real sense of exploration going for it.

That said, I did enjoy the TR:U demo, and was damn close to picking it up on release. All this talk about it being short and patterned after TR:L has me put off a bit, though. So I think I'm gonna hold off and grab this one when it hits the bargain bins instead.

Renzatic on 27/11/2008 at 01:02

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That didn't bother me too much. It's the whole hallways with obstacle courses level design I didn't like. Tomb Raider, and even TR:A, though it was simplified a bit compared to the original, had sprawling levels you could actually get lost in.

EvaUnit02 on 18/12/2008 at 15:40

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(http://forums.eidosgames.com/showthread.php?t=84316) v1.1 patch was released earlier in the week for the PC version.

Also there was a free classic outfit DLC pack released for the 360 version.

Maybe if game had GfW Live support, they could've rolled out the Microsoft exclusive premium DLC for PC as well, like what Bethsoft is doing with Fallout 3.