Lara Croft. Just mention that name to anybody with even a passing knowledge of video games and they will instantly know what game you are talking about. Not to mention the rather robust... "Images" that the name evokes. OK, she has big breasts! There, I said it! There was even a period of time around the release of the first Tomb Raider movie where the media discussed Lara as some kind of role model for young girls. Gamers were never fooled though; we knew that Lara had been lovingly crafted to please us with her bouncing breasts. And glorious breasts they were! Of course, it was the brilliant gameplay that was the foundation of one of the most popular gaming franchises in history. So, now that Lara has gone Hollywood, how has she fared?

The short answer is: Horrible. Actually that word doesn't really do justice to how bad this game is. Playing it was a tortuous experience with hardly any redeeming value.

The controls were atrocious. There is one word that constantly describes your experience in this game: slow. The control response is slow, the character movement is slow, and everything else is SLOW! Hitting a button on your controller is no guarantee that Lara will react, or she might react right away, or a few seconds later. It all just depends on her mood I guess.

The stock-in-trade of Tomb Raider games, the jumping-action puzzles, is a nightmare using these controls. There is no way to control the distance of a jump, so you end up casting around trying to find THE spot that you are required to jump to. Mercifully, you are now allowed to save your game on the fly, but the jumping sections are now an exercise in jump/die/reload until you find the magic spot. I finally resorted to saving the game each and every time I managed to make a successful jump.

The developers tout their "entirely new control system and experience new levels of gameplay with hand-to-hand combat, stealth attacks..." In practice this system feels tacked on to the game. Hand-to-hand is executed by repeatedly pressing the X button. It is made even more fun by the fact that Lara does not track her target in H2H, so you will often find yourself swinging at air while the guy stands beside you and clubs you to death. FUN!

To make matters worse, the gunplay is a mess in this game. Gone is Lara's ability to perform acrobatic stunts while gunning down her opponents. Now it is a matter of walking or slowly jogging around while firing. The damage system makes no sense, either. You can shoot an opponent a dozen times at point-blank range before he dies, and turn around and shoot his friend once and he drops. If you had some control over where Lara aims, I could understand this, but since she auto-aims, it is just silly, and most likely another one of the myriad of bugs that plague this game.

As you might expect with a third-person game, you will find yourself arguing with the camera position in TRAD. In general it tracks pretty well, but there are times where it is annoying as hell. Especially when you are moving in and out of the fixed camera locations; you can find yourself spinning around and running right back where you just came from if you aren't careful.

One last point: For the first time Lara actually has branching conversation trees when you talk to characters in the game; neat, right? Wrong. Because it doesn't matter which branch you choose, it just goes around to the same thing. If choose to ask question A, in 2 or 3 sentences Lara will ask question B anyway. I only found one instance where the selection made a difference, and that "option" just led to instant death; so much for story driven gameplay.

Sound and graphics fall into the acceptable range, but there is certainly nothing worth nothing here.

This game is typical of the results of movie tie-in games. It looks and feels rushed and has no replay value. In fact I commend you if you have the patience to play this for more than a few hours. I am a long time fan of the Tomb Raider games, and as far as I am concerned, this isn't one of them. I'll just look on this game as a made-for-TV version of Lara Croft and leave it at that.