After having broken many of the first details on Tomb Raider Underworld, we’ve spent many an hour just running through Legend and Anniversary again and again, waiting for the day when we’d actually get our hands dirty with the new Lara Croft experience, which is exactly what the recently released demo allowed us to do.

A lot has changed in Underworld since Lara went berserk on Amanda and ran off to stop an impending catastrophe in Legend. Old foes, greater mysteries, harder puzzles and a tougher Lara, all dutifully take their place amongst the wonderfully detailed game world rendered brilliantly by the new engine. (Also rumoured to be powering the upcoming Deus Ex 3) But it isn’t just the engine that’s managed to get an overhaul – Lara herself has gotten an extreme makeover to win the hearts of next generation gamers – sporting a firmly toned athletic “Hot Mommy” body, a much more grittier look (modelled after gymnast Alison Carroll, who takes over from Karima Adebibe) and yes, to answer the burning question, quite sensible breasts.

The demo begins with Lara (who seems to have conveniently “appropriated” Natla’s yacht from Anniversary) engaged in an all-too familiar conversation with Zip and Alister about Helheim, the Norse underworld and how both it and Avalon are actually one and the same, continuing the plot that Legend kicked off. Unfortunately, those who played Legend but not Anniversary may find themselves getting short changed as far as crucial plot elements go, considering that Amanda seems to have found and imprisoned Natla, who begrudgingly seems to point Lara in the right direction, presumably until she can find a way to escape her confinement and tear Amanda and Lara into tiny shreds.

What’s immediately apparent as soon as the player gets control of Lara is how much the franchise has changed in terms of visual quality. Underworld has most definitely raised the bar as far as the looks department is concerned – gone are the days of the all-too-apparent paths, the limp waters and the glowing ledges. Taking a page straight out of Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, the entire world looks and feels like it would in reality, with lush greenery that reacts to stimulus – including Lara, as she runs through them, pushing them out of her way or the waters of the ocean, which actually swell with the wave motion, making objects bob realistically – creating a very distinct feel of mass that was totally absent in Tomb Raider games before Underworld.

As Lara dives off the yacht and makes her way inland, you get a feeling of slight unease, because for the first time in the series, you are completely left clueless on how and where you’re supposed to proceed. Crystal Dynamics, true to their word, have made Underworld an experience where the focus is not just on the puzzles, the story or the combat, but on assessing the environment in front of you, figuring out where you need to go and how exactly to get from where you are to where you should be. So now, instead of fortuitously placed ladders and ropes, players should see Lara using the environment – projections in the rock surface, for example – to get to her destination.

Coming to the inventory, the system works as a combination between what we’ve seen in Legend and Anniversary, where players will have to follow the Anniversary path by going out of their way to pick up artefacts and herbal health drinks, which serve as replacements for the handy medipacks everyone seemed to drop in Legend. Using them, though, along with the PLS, the magnetic grapple and the binoculars (which seem to have lost their RAD mode upgrade), is exactly the same as it was in Legend. And if you get lost or stumped, the PDA serves as the voice of Lara’s thoughts (a function provided by her Journal in the previous games) while a handy sonar tool maps out your environment in 3D, just in case you’re having trouble locating that pesky key. Unfortunately, the minimalist HUD that the previous games sported seems to have been replaced with a more elaborate Halo 2-ish one, showing Lara’s health, oxygen levels, equipped weapon and ammo count on a bigger, more stylish panel instead of simple bars, while the target reticule now shows an enemy’s remaining health as Lara struggles to whittle it down to zero.

Coming to Underworld’s evolved combat system, Lara now has a whole new bunch of attacks, including a more powerful version of the roundhouse kick she threw in Legend, all designed to push her enemies away from her and in front of her gun barrels. Players who preferred the Adrenaline Dodge headshot moves from Anniversary (like yours truly) will now face an extra chore as they manually have to get in close to their targets to start the adrenaline move, which ends with you manually guiding the aiming reticule to the target to pull off the headshot. And to their credit, the enemies just aren’t as forgiving as they were in the earlier games. Sharks, bats, spiders and worst of all, tigers (I didn’t know tigers hunted in packs! Shame on you, Animal Planet!) all try to tear our pretty little archaeologist apart, while Lara jumps, dodges and shoots her way to safety in a fluid, lifelike manner. However, enemies that get killed disappear after some time, casting a shadow on the developers’ earlier comments about dead bodies staying put and serving as navigational markers to show whether Lara’s been through that particular area before.

And if you’re getting too tired of getting killed and want to make like Sheba meets Rambo, there’s always the player tailoring options that allow you to change the gameplay to suit your style by increasing or decreasing parameters such as how often you bump into the baddies, the magazine capacity of your guns or the damage enemies do to Lara (and vice versa) – making the gameplay easier or harder on-demand.

Unfortunately, there are some minor issues that tend to make the experience frustrating at times for the players, including the return of the annoying controls that suddenly tend to snap to your shifting camera right as you are doing something tricky, inevitably resulting in Ms. Croft plunging to her demise, replete with floppy ragdoll death animations that we’re still waiting to see fixed. Needless to say, the experience is much more appealing with the Xbox 360 controller or a good gamepad rather than fighting the wonky camera with a keyboard and mouse.

The subdued background score and the music, composed by Colin O’Malley under supervision by Legend and Anniversary composer, Troels Folmann, is hardly noticeable and takes on shades of Angel of Darkness rather than the typical Tomb Raider meets Batman Begins theme that I personally have come to love over the past two games. Voice acting, as usual, is of excellent quality with Keeley Hawes, Kath Soucie and Grey DeLisle reprising their roles as Lara Croft, Amanda and Natla.

At over 15 minutes long (longer if you go for all the artefacts and health drinks), the Tomb Raider Underworld demo dishes out an appetizer that has had us going stark raving mad as we wait for the main course coming November 21, 2008 to India, on par with the European release. At INR 2199 for the Xbox 360 version, INR 2499 for the PS3 version and with the PC version’s pricing yet to be announced, Tomb Raider Underworld is all set to join the ranks of the dozens of other AAA titles that are determined to make our wallets squeal for mercy before the year draws to an end.

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• Deepak Says:
  Tuesday, November 11th, 2008 02:29 pm GMT +5.5 at 2:29 pm

  “main course coming November 21, 2007 to India”

  You mean November 21, 2008…

• Krishnan Rajagopal Says:
  Tuesday, November 11th, 2008 04:27 pm GMT +5.5 at 4:27 pm

  Oops, heh, heh, about that. Funny how I always keep sticking to the past.. ohboy.

• rhara Says:
  Sunday, December 21st, 2008 07:59 am GMT +5.5 at 7:59 am

  hahahah natapos ko na ang laro at naoaka ganda