It is not so much frustrating as it is boring. Even if it looks nice.
The Story.
Underworld takes place right after the Legend but we start the adventure from somehow the middle of the actual story and see Lara escape from her burning mansion. Zip tries to shoot her and we are left puzzled why. Like I said the answer is given half way through the game and is nothing excinting. What this episode is about is looking for Thors gauntlets, belt and hammer to kill a god. This adventure will take us to a jungle, a coastal jungle, some other jungle, under our own mansion, to a ship, underwater temple and some ice levels. Its quite nice set although the actual temples and crypts feel somewhat alike. I guess thats because all the ancient cultures where actually connected as the game implies.
The Gameplay
At first it feels alright - we get all the moves from previous "new" titles like climbing rocks, ledges, grapple hood and other stuff. There is a addition of a using the grappling hook to rappel down and thats totaly reasonable. What I don't get is why there is so much of the linear climbing since we have the hook. Why does it only attach to metal rings? There is a lot of relatively low ledges that you could easyli scale with a rope. But not Lara. She has to travel half the level to get there.
Also all the level feels extremely linear with almost no places of intrest. I remeber the first games in the series where you would stop and look around to examine the possible ways to get to your destination. In Underworld it is more apparent that what you do is irrevelant as long as you hear autosave sound every now and than. There are no dead-end edges, there is no way to get lost and whe you climb you always see the place you want to climb to next. It gets so boring it almost beats scalling buldings in Assassins Creed (hold up and press a button)
Combat can put you to sleep even quicker. Or perhaps annoy. There is total auto aim that requires you to hold the left mouse button and thats pretty much it. Lara can now target two targets at once so any spider or bat encounter is really holding a button for 2-6 seconds while standing. Fun, right? The AI have little to say - the soldiers do not take cover, fire from time to time and generally pose no threat. Any bomb you throw will land at their feet even though you weren't aiming at all. Most bizzare thing is that enemies that only have melee attacks will stop after you climb a stone block. What are those panther doing there eating lead? Not that it matters because you have auto aim but it looks really strange
The puzzles are painfully obvious if not for a frustration of searching for different patch. They almost all consist of finding one object (axel, head plate, a prism), placing it in the right spot and solving kindergarten sequence. Moreover most puzzles are layered so solving one puzzle migh be a prt of a bigger one and on the other side of the door is yet another one. Actually even the story line follows this pattern: You need Hammer of Thor to kill Natla, to get the hammer you need the gauntlets, to power gauntlets you need the belt, and so on with mini objectives. There are some cut scene introductions to an area but its nothing that would make you want see more.
One of the most annoying things is that several times the games ask you to retract the WHOLE level to get out. Why would you want that, can it just skip to the surface like every other game in the series?
Also they removed the moments where you had to press a button visible on screen in favor of slow motion moments (adrenaline moments). What it does is slow time so you could easily avoid incoming object. My translation: last time we had to do 2 animations for winning and failing the event and now they do NO animation only slow down time. Its not a challenge and not fun to watch (where I enjoyed some death animations), so whats the point.
Some platforming is tedious. Mostly because of the camera but also some terrible level design. One infamous level that was in the demo version (Coastal Thailand) is in the game with the same shape. In the first stage you have to climb up for 2 minutes and you reach seemingly dead end. Thats only because the camera will not let you rotate and the ledge is behind it. You have to figure out to jump into one place that you can't see. A moment later the last jump can be failed randomly by Lara even though she jumps to almost every place automatically. This is more frustrating because there is water underneath and you can't die. So every fault is followed by 5 minutes of retracing your steps.
There are no boss fights and getting Thors accesories give you almost no new powers. There is no gymnasium obviosly so you can't find any secrets with the new powers anyway.
EDIT: Repetetiveness
I finally managed to finish the game and the biggest issue was that many things had to be repeated twice or more. First level has to be retraced back as whole. There is a ship in the game and later we learn that it has a sister ship, which conveniently is the same so we pretty much follow the same path. There is a room with 4 swinging hammers - the games takes you on a tour that includes rides every single one of them. Some other level have to be retraced with a motorcycle and driving it is nothing exciting.
I have to say I was bored boyond belief playing this game and the only thing that kept me playing was that I wanted to see the ending. I believe that it is the least engaging game in the series and also the best looking but graphics alone can't be the sole reason for playing.