Bottom line, I find myself only interested in one thing: Lara Croft.
You take control of Lara Croft, you can jump, roll, shoot, sprint, kick, and that's pretty much about it. This is a pretty standard action adventure game where combat is featured, but not that significant towards gameplay. Most of the time you will be climbing and searching your way to overcome obstacles, solving puzzles. Monsters will only appear in scripted location. The environments are beautiful, the developer really created a sense of ancient ruins, you few like you really exploring some mysteries world which so far no human have ever set foot before.
Puzzles in this game are relatively easy compares to the puzzles in Silent Hill and Penumbra Series, and if you really can't figure them out, you can always refer to field assistance in your PDA. The environmental puzzles are fun, but some are annoying due to the design, and that's the main problem of this game. There is no freedom. I understand it is hard to create such game with freedom to roam around, but at least the game designer should consider different ways of approach. Having linear environmental puzzles will only make it looks like someone purposely put them there for you to solve, and sometimes it's hard to figure out the solution (The Maya underworld for example, I tried like 1 hour to find the route to the yellow seal door, I can't, coz was looking at completely opposite way of approach ….then I went for dinner, came back, walking around, suddenly I found it.)
The camera work sucks. It gets stuck often, it will turn itself while you moving, and yet you can't turn it while in tight areas. The control is bad. I mean BAD. Sometimes Lara will just jump in a random direction even thou you clearly turn your controller to the direction you want to go. This is very frustrating especially you already have that kind of linear map design. I mean, what's the point of playing when you keeping dying and you know it is clearly the problem of the control. Sometimes you will over jump and fall, it's really random, if I under jump a distance I know it's my own mistake as I pushed Lara's limit too much, but over jump? Hello?
The game suffers from sense of realism too. Wall jump is cool but I really doubt someone could actually do that. Lara has a very poor sense of balance, even thou she clearly learned gymnastic and mastered it. Hello? You ever seen a gymnastic walks on a pole for like 30cm and fell? She can't roll into safe landing too; sometimes small fall could kill her. All that we have is only a nice- for-show roll with can't reduce my fall damage, and it don't look fluent too. Animals are not supposed to take so many bullets to kill. I mean you could increase the difficulty by allow them to kill you with 1 or 2 bites, but you don't have to make us to shoot at tigers for like 20 rounds in order to kill them. Human enemies are a joke. They will not look for cover, they take a lot of bullets to kill, and they WILL NOT MISS a single shot. No matter how you jump, roll, they WILL hit you. They will even run in front of you and shoot you.
The sound tracks are ok. I especially like the main theme and Thailand explore theme which are awesome and perfectly suit the atmosphere. Other themes are just average, and the ambient sounds are just too loud to even be considered "ambient".
Bottom line, I find myself only interested in one thing: Lara Croft. Without her or if she didn't rendered as nice looking as she is in Underworld, I think I will never give this game a chance. I put Lara's poster on my wall and my GF gets pissed off about it. This game has no value. It's linear, awful camera and control, and short. I finished the game in TWO days, and I only played at night, so you can guess how short it is. The only good thing is the game makes me read a lot about Norse Mythology, only to find out the developer was bluffing most of it…..I might be wrong, but Shiva is a God in Hindu religion…Thailand has little people worship Hinduism…..And why Thor 's gauntlet was there…the timeline doesn't even fit….