Lara's acrobatics

Careful now...

Lara has kept all of the agility and fancy moves she learned in Tomb Raider: Legend. She can balance on top of tall objects and swing across chasms or run along the walls with a rope attached to a grappling hook. The grappler is not as high tech - instead of a magnetic grappling hook, Lara uses an old-fashioned hook on the rope. Weapons and gadgetry also reflect the simpler times - no PDA, no binoculars, no lamp or headset, and no fancy sidekick feeding information. Just a girl, her guns, a journal and the grappling hook. Weapons also play a far smaller role than in Tomb Raider: Legend as well. In addition to the familiar dual pistols Lara can find a shotgun, a pair of 50cal pistols and a pair of Uzis.

Most moves are easy to perform and the game offers very forgiving path to learning the gameplay. Every time a new ability is put to use, or a familiar ability is used in a new way, the first spot has a "safety net" - if you fail, there is no 100 foot drop below, and you can immediately try again until you learn the trick. Then you are slowly pressed to use the abilities in more dangerous spots, and soon enough you will be performing death-defying leaps at dizzying heights, with little room for error. As usual, Tomb Raider: Anniversary excels in providing an incredible number of ways you can end up breaking every bone in Lara's body. And it's not the fall that will kill you, it's the sudden stop at the end - those bones still make that terrifying crunch when you hit the ground.

Some puzzles make you all warm and fuzzy inside.

Other places offer you a swim if you slip up. Notice the proper shadows and the wet shirt!

Once you have mastered Lara's abilities, you are thrown the final curveball - many later levels require you to perform all of those abilities, mixing them in rapid sequences with extremely tight time limits. Platforms move, monkey bars spring out of a wall for a few seconds after a lever is pulled and the gate in the end is slowly sliding shut. One slip-up means that you can't reach the required spot before the room resets to the initial configuration (and in many cases you end up with those broken bones or worse). At the final level this is taken to the logical conclusion - there are spots where you need to pull off eight different jumps, a mid-vault turn on a monkey bar, a quick shimmy along a ledge and two non-stop wall-runs with the grappling hook as the clock ticks - with only a few seconds of time to spare and nice hot pool of lava waiting for you if you mess things up even in the slightest. To add to the difficulty, some jumps are done "blind", trusting that Lara will grab that handhold you can't see as you leap.

Thankfully there is a very liberal amount of checkpoints in the levels, and getting Lara killed will only return you to the previous checkpoint you have passed. While it can be slightly annoying to re-do a series of jumps and other moves after failing the last bit before reaching that switch or lever with the checkpoint, at worst all you have to do is re-play a few minutes and the amount you are set back always feels fair. You can save anywhere, but the progress is saved only up to the latest checkpoint you have passed.

All-new bonus goodies

While the level concepts are familiar, there is plenty of new stuff to find. TRA tracks all the items you find in the level, and bonus features are unlocked based on these. The most challenging bit comes from finding artefacts and relics; each level has several items that are mostly placed in spots that are hard to notice. However, once you realize there is an extra path, the actual feat of reaching the artefact is completely doable. The relics are a tougher nut to crack though. There are total of eight relics hidden in the levels, and they are truly hard to reach. In many cases you might notice where the relic is, but the actual trick is to figure out how on earth you can get to it.

Once you have completed a set of levels, you can re-play it with designer commentary, triggered by these blue crystals.

Completing the levels and finding the hidden items also open up other special features - concept art, cutscenes, cheat codes, and as a truly great bonus, a designer's commentary track. As you complete a level, you open up the option to re-play that level with blue gems dotting the area. Activating a gem starts a chapter of commentary from Jason Botta, the Game Director of Tomb Raider Anniversary and Toby Gard, the designer of the original Tomb Raider game. Many of the commentary pieces offer interesting insights on how the original game was produced despite the technological limits of the time, and how those ideas were re-done with the modern technology available.

In addition to all this, there is also the ultimate game mode for the true pros, the Time Trial. This mode puts you seriously on the clock. Instead of having to pull off hard non-stop sequences of several moves to proceed, you actually have to pull off whole levels without pausing and close to perfect to meet the harsh time limits.