Tomb Raider: Underworld

Underworld is the third entry in the Tomb Raider Legend trilogy, and for the most part, it’s a lot of fun: when it comes to platforming, puzzles and exploration, the gameplay is as good as ever. It keeps building on both previous entries’ strengths, and thus has a ton of great sections filled with badass acrobatic feats and well-designed puzzles. However, the camera tends to get crazy and the control scheme is still very much implemented with consoles in mind, so you may want to play with a controller. Much like Legend and Anniversary, it’s a really good-looking and atmospheric game. The music is great, the character models and animations are rock solid, but the environments are the real star of the show here: the vegetation is lush, the architectures are crazy, the wide open spaces are intoxicating. It’s simply... gorgeous. The writing is decent and gives Lara some good lines. And yet, this game is far from perfect, and has issues that seem to point towards a rushed development. The combat is fun overall and lets you use cool slow-mo mechanics, but it’s a bit flat and even annoying at times: the developers seemed to be aware of it, since combats are quite scarce and that there are sadly no actual boss fights. Underworld also pretty much demands you to be familiar with both previous installments: it does little effort to recap their storyline, and even assumes you’re already familiar with the mechanics of the series and doesn’t bother explaining them to you. Among other issues: DLCs were released but are not available on PC, the collectibles are annoying to find and don’t unlock new outfits, and some glitchy physics and occasional crashes are to deplore. To be clear: none of Underworld’s problems are really huge on their own, but their accumulation can definitely have a negative impact on your experience. Still, it’s a good game on its own and a satisfying conclusion to this trilogy. If you enjoyed the other Tomb Raider games, this one is definitely a good pick!

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.