If anything would strike a chord with Lara fans, it's that aqualung. The first level, in the Mediterranean, for example, has Lara leaping off her gin-palace with, for the first time, an aqualung, before solving a puzzle that takes place entirely underwater. There are new aspects to the game, which do impinge on gameplay. Tomb Raider Underworld always feels more logical than its predecessors. In Tomb Raider Underworld when, say, you're standing on a pillar and it starts to collapse, instead of having to push the X button and the A button at specified times, you just have to react and jump before plummeting to a rag-doll physics demise. The boss battles, which tended towards the fiddly and invariably involved tedious periods of button-bashing, have been abandoned, as have recent Tomb Raiders' occasional timed button-pressing. Gard and co have taken a back-to-basics approach, assessing Tomb Raider's best aspects, so in Underworld you get huge, engrossing and epic puzzles that involve much leaping, swinging and climbing from Lara, a strong storyline, the usual shooting of endangered animals and rival treasure hunters, and no more. It's easy to detect the hand of Toby Gard, Lara's originator, who is now back in the fold at the game's San Francisco-based developer, Crystal Dynamics. The franchise is incredibly successful and changing it radically just for the sake of it could render it worthless.Īnd when you get stuck into Tomb Raider Underworld, it swiftly becomes clear that it is designed to appeal to a generation of gamers – surely now in their 30s – who grew up with Tomb Raider and fell in love with Lara's attributes and attitude. Looking at the game dispassionately, it would appear to lack a killer innovation, something that adds a new twist to the franchise. If anything, Lara's movement is the key aspect of Tomb Raider Underworld. And for the first time, Lara's movements are governed by motion capture, rather than hand animation, so she moves in a more deliciously gymnastic fashion than ever. Since it's the first Tomb Raider game designed for next-generation consoles from the outset, you'd expect it to look good, and it doesn't disappoint. Indeed, in her latest starring vehicle, Tomb Raider Underworld, Lara has never looked or moved better. However, one of Cool Britannia's standard bearers continues to beaver away, doing what she does as well as ever: Lara Croft.
The Spice Girls are no more, Tony Blair is no longer one of the most powerful men in the world, and the country is generally too busy trying to scrape a living to bother about being cool. Its standard bearers haven't fared too well. T he concept of Cool Britannia now seems laughable – a discredited chunk of spin from a previous century.
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