Tomb Raider: Underworld Preview

Lara's back, and she looks better than ever.

Lara looks gorgeous. And we're not talking about Alison Carroll, 23, from Croydon either. We're talking about the real Lara. Well, the real virtual Lara. There she is, swaying her hips, running about with a lovely new sprinting animation ("People say it's the best sprint animation they've seen in a game so far," gushes Eidos' publishing producer Adam Phillips), with a pole in one hand and a pistol in the other, with dirt on her face and on her legs and context sensitive foliage receding as if it were bowing in reverence to her presence. To be sure, this Lara, this new, motion captured (for the first time, with the wonderfully named US gold medallist gymnast Heidi Moneymaker), more realistic Lara, has never looked better.

We're sitting in front of a cinema screen buried deep within the bowels of central London getting a sneak peek at mid-alpha code of Tomb Raider: Underworld's second level, set in coastal Thailand. It's a level that starts with Lara getting very, very wet. Before you get excited, it's because she's swimming in the ocean.

The water glistens on Lara's skin as the sun goes to work drying her off. Calming music plays in the background, the kind of thing you'd expect to hear in an independent bookshop. Ambient sound effects ping off of our ear drums - birds perhaps, or other animals hidden deep in the jungle. She stops, surveying the impressive vista before her. We can see miles into the distance - the jungle, the open sea, sharks circling just beneath the see-through surface and an ancient temple that looks ominously like the kind of place Lara enjoys spending time in, are all visible in glorious detail.

She pushes her way through the dense foliage, just one of the many new context sensitive animations developer Crystal Dynamics has been hard at work implementing over the past couple of years. Birds fly off as she approaches, a breadcrumb style visual clue that you're going the right way. She picks up dirt as she moves about - on her legs, her arms, her face. If she dives into water that dirt will wash off and she'll once again emerge glistening. Rain, as we saw the last time we checked in with Underworld, will have the same effect.

Expect more of an open world feel this time around

"It looks very different from previous Tomb Raiders," says Eidos UK marketing boss John Brooke. "Previous Tomb Raiders have been about closed tomb environments and it's a testament really to the next-gen hardware that allows us to create this huge vista and this beautiful interactive world."

We agree, there is much that is different about this particular Lara adventure. Rekindling memories of Ubisoft's flawed gem Assassin's Creed, Lara now has a new free climbing system with which players can pick their own paths through the game's expansive levels. These 'free walls' can be any shape, convex, concave, whatever, making obsolete the straight ledge syndrome previous Tomb Raider games have suffered from, and have enabled Crystal Dynamics to really express themselves with level design. "There's tons of different ways through that QA will find," Adam says. "Some the design team didn't realise were there but if they work they work."

To supplement the new free climbing system Lara's been given a set of new, silky smooth gymnastic moves that help her get around the game's environments. She's got a new Mario-esque wall jump, a new balance mechanic (use left and right on the thumb stick to adjust movement when on poles and the like), a safety grab, a context sensitive auto vault, the list goes on.

The grapple hook from Legend and Anniversary has been completely redesigned. Before Lara would have to jump, grapple and then swing. Now she can grapple first, move about and then attempt a jump, considerably reducing risk and opening up some interesting gameplay options. The grapple will bend around objects, too, whereas before it would retract if it touched anything, enabling her to use the power of physics to move otherwise immovable objects, like large boulders or pillars.