Apparently Eidos were/are in financial difficulty (again) and wanted the game released before their financial year ended at the end of June to get some black ink in their books -- the end result being gamers worldwide aren't really seeing the new Lara at her best.

What do you mean she's not dead? Half a pyramid fell on her at the end of The Last Revelation! Just goes to show you can't keep a good girl down as the inimitable Ms Croft once again launches herself on another violent rampage through the world of supernatural occult villainy. Having recovered from that mild case of being buried alive (presumed dead) under a few million tons of worked stone Lara finds herself in Paris; firstly at the request of her old mentor Werner Von Croy, and later on to avenge his death whilst attempting to clear her own name. Not an easy job when your basic chirpy "let's go adventuring!" disposition has taken a turn for the nastier due to time spent under all that rock -- if the girl had gotten anymore pallidly goth she'd be trawling the streets dressed in black with panda eyes.

The plot goes on to revolve around the neferious occult activities of a group dating back to the fourteen hundreds and it's mysterious leader, The Black Alchemist. Meanwhile back in the modern Paris, and later on in Prague there's also a serial killer on the loose just to further confuse matters. Lara's memory of the night Von Croy got gakked is also being jogged here and there as she remembers more details of what happened at certain points throughout the game.

This time the adventure is not hers alone to discover either, as we are introduced to one Kurtis Trent, ex-French Foreign Legionnaire and initiate of the Lux Veritatis -- an ancient order opposed to the Black Alchemist. Although you do get to see him quite early on in the piece Kurtis doesn't become playable until he's really gotten himself both neck deep into the plot and on Lara's bad side. Overall for the series Kurtis is a neat new addition, although you have to wonder why you don't get to use his cool little whirly disk-blade toy or his psychic-viewing power in this little outing.

Much has been made in the game's previews of the absence of proper tombs throughout the game; drawing the ire of long-time Laraphiles who struggle to see her doing anything else other than running down dusty stone corridors during game-time. This isn't really all that big a deal as there's more than enough underworld-style levels in the ghettos, sewers and archaeological digs to complement the modern settings like the nightclub and art gallery. No matter their age, old ruined buildings and complexes fit the TR ambience almost as well as the undiscovered ruined tombs and temples of previous TRs. Again Core show a healthy disregard for geographical credibility too with there being previously unknown huge flowing rivers of lava hidden under the flat alluvial river plain Paris is built upon...

There's not actually that much to the game in terms of content; it being short due to the 'unfinished' business, although given rate at which the 'die to succeed puzzles' work and how the controls frustrate you'll spend a fair while redoing parts of it over and over. Anywhere from 10-20 hours depending on how fastidious you are in regards to the pickups appears to be the norm. It might get longer depending on how often you have to reload games and/or just play tourist and wander around the environments, eyes oogling the sights.

To aid Lara in her quest this time she has Werner's old notebook which is chock full of disorganised clues -- a decent bit of time has to be spent reading this notebook in order to discover what you have to do next. The journal can't always help though with the frustrating part being that once again some of the puzzles, like those of the earlier games, are built around near impossible challenges whereby eventual success comes from dying repeatedly and continuing from a save pre-armed with the knowledge then acquired from 'beyond the grave', so to speak. Having said that it's not quite approaching the level of TR3 and its 'extra for experts' kind of theme and most average TR gamers should get past the challenges with room and time to spare.

The control/camera system is pretty much the same as before, only very much less responsive and with more of those old annoying Alone in the Dark/Resident Evil style static cinematic camera views which the player can't break out of to return to the standard 3rd person asscam. For PC users there finally cometh the addition of the mouse but it's not been implemented as smoothly as it could have been. There's no free mouselook on permanently -- that still requires a sluggishly responsive keypress -- and all you can really do is swing Lara around left or right. Further, for some reason the up/down movement becomes inverted when Lara is underwater which is really, truely, deeply, annoying.

Count yourselves lucky in one regard; as PC users at least we're not stuck with the Sony-forced analogue stick controls the paperweight users have to contend with, and at least the PC manual isn't full of info about features that never made it into the game we've been given.

In a similar vein to the inverted y-axis for swimming, the auto-grab function has become somewhat of an annoyance too; Lara automatically grabs onto ladders as you try to run her past them, or auto-vaults over railings to her her death many hundreds of feet below if you run her into them.