Much improved!
THE BAD: Weak gunplay, boring bike missions pretty short game, one to many boss battles, good voice overs but english people dont talk like that!, AI is nothing spectacular and some bad camera angles.
Back in the days of tomb raider 1,2,3 and the awful dark angel, the acrobatics were an annoying feature that just came up a little to much...well this game is set around them but the gameplay has improved dramatically - its also alot more fun!
The graphics on this game are great, the water looks very realistic, the weather looks good and the general attention to detail deserves a medal - especially the landscape. Lara also looks impressive.
The acrobatics are very easy to get to grips with making it alot of fun, compared to past games where you had to perfectly line yourself up with a rope to jump on it, this game is more forgiving and providing your jumping in the right direction, you will grab hold of it. Most (probably all but 1) are straight forward and fun. Most involve putting boxes on switches to open doors, but although this sounds boring, they put you in situations where the boxes arent exactly easy to get to. Some (about 2) puzzle arent very straight forward and at one point i had to look in a walkthrough to know what i was supposed to be doing, but on a whole, is a decent addition to the series.
In the game you get to pick up weapons from the enmies you defeat, and theres quite a decent amount of them (probably not as many as the last tomb raider games), from grenade launchers to shotguns, and the dual pistols are still in there. near the end of the game you get excaliber, a sword that fires this green power source stuff which is pretty fun to play with.
The sad thing about this game is that the gun play has got worse, when you shoot somebody or something, it always looks like your shooting metal, i was shooting a jaguar at one point and instead of blood, this may sound grusome, but it does take away the realism and therefore the fun. the guns seem a bit weak aswell, the jaguar took around 10 of my pistol bullets - very unrealistic. The range on your weapons is also pretty bad, your pistols can accurately shoot about 3 metres in front of you and then they are flying all over the place. Lastly the weapons dont seem to effect the enemy when your shooting at them, they just take and and shoot back until one of you is dead. But the good thing about the weapons is that the jumping bullet time move is pretty sweet.
The bike missions are also very boring and theone where your chasing a train goes on for longer than you would want it to, the steering is basic and theres no real fear of crashing because most of the time when you do, you just stop instead of falling off.
The boss battles are also a bit annoying, especially when you verse one after every second mission, but they are all different so it isnt to bad.
The sound of the enviroments and guns are good, and the voice overs are alsogood, but nobody in england speaks like lara does, even the posh dont speak as annoyingly as her.
The AI is pretty weak in this game, when an enemy sees you (and thats another thing, theres a lack of stealth on the game) they pretty much just stand there and shoot at you, and all the enemies look pretty much the same, which is also a bit disappointing.
Finally the camera can be a nuicence in close quater acrobatics, it stops you from seeing where you want to go and therefore can make you miss the jump, this is rare however so is nothing major.
In coinclusion this is a decent addition to the tomb raider series and i would recomend it to any fans of the tr serreis and anybody that like the prince of persia series.