Tomb Raider: Underworld

The best version of Tomb Raider in my opinion. Great puzzles, great graphics, and controls work fine. I had a problem to run this game on Win11, but I found a workaround for this: - run "cmd.exe" as an administrator - call "start /affinity 7FFFFFFF tru.exe" in the game folder

looks nice for its age, plays well too. payed maxed out on hd4600 igpu at 1366x768, smooth as butter. was fun to play. some good combat especialy later. lots of puzzle solving, some tuff ones had me stuck for a while. on sale its worth it.

Not only the best Lara Adventure, but possibly the best adventure-puzzle-platformer in general. There are things one can criticise: the reduced difficulty (comparing to TR:A), further simplification (you can carry all the guns, but there are no ammo drops, for example), too many secrets to really go 100% without a walkthrough, considerably shorter playtime to the preceding two. But what it gets right, it nails: a better, gripping, story than half of the Indiana Jones films, and the atmosphere of discovery. Greatly improved graphics allow for lush vegetation, and a large part of the game happens in overgrown, South East Asian temples, modeled after Angkor Wat and similar. Lara gets new moves, which add little to the game play, but increase immersion. Both platforming and puzzles seem completly natural, and while the path is completely linear, the levels do not have a contrived feel of a platformer game, requiring no suspension of disbelief - at least in terms of levels, you still need to swallow the usual supernatural and ancient super advanced civilisation stuff, but that's par course of this genre). While some levels in Legend come close, here you really feel like you are exploring something, if not real, then at least believable, rather than playing a platforming game. I won't spoil the story, but while it rounds up nicely both Legend and Anniversary. it can be experienced completly on its own, if you prefer to start familiarizing yourself with the best title. It pays to read Lara's journal, as its entries tie everything she encounters to existing (mostly Norse) mythology. The levels also follow each other more naturally, without that world hopping for the sake of it feel which is typical to all Lara's (and Henry Jones's) adventures. It doesn't have the best puzzles, platforming, combat or story of all times, but it's one of the best gaming experiences I had, competing with adventure films on their own terms, while being an engrossing game to boot.

While Legend was a fun game, it was probably not something that a fan of the classic Tomb Raider would fully approve of, since it was all movie-like, bombastic, verbose, and action oriented. In a lot of ways it felt like a precursor to what the series would eventually turn into with the 2013 iteration. Underworld, however, feels much closer in spirit to the original games by dialing back the in-game dialogue, scaling back the cinematic action scenes (no more QTEs, thankfully), and putting the focus back on exploration, tricky platforming, and puzzle solving in largely abandoned and isolated locations. The atmosphere and gameplay are pretty great for the most part. You may encounter an occasionally unresponsive camera or a glitch, but overall it's nothing that would seriously drag the game down. My only issue was with the story, which feels rather unremarkable due to stiff dialogue and rather downbeat tone. The aforementioned scaling back of the overly verbose dialogue works good for immersing you during gameplay but as a result the game seems to be lacking a lot of the humor, energy and charm that made Legend stand out so much.

The game has the worst controls of the trilogy, but has the best scenaries/level design... though it often feels like there's not much to do. The PC port looks quite a bit worse than the X360 version (which has decent motion blur), and even worse than the PS3 port (which lacks some effects from X360 version) - in the PC the hair shader is quite worse and there's no flashlight shadows. I'd still recommend a playthrough, just... keep your expectations in check. The PC version also doesn't have the X360's DLCs. The croft manor DLC is probably the best level in the LAU trilogy.