Not many humans, but plenty of creatures to fight
In the first few levels, which take you through cities and caves in Peru and Greece you'll only be encountered by animals such as bats, wolves and panthers, but later on in the game there's a number of supernatural enemies such as winged and mystical mutants, which are far more difficult to defeat. However, though I haven't completed the game, the combat sequences are fairly unremarkable because the enemy A.I is pretty poor; even in the first level, wolves glitch in doorways and are more a nuisance then a challenge to dispatch and the function that allows you to switch between enemies isn't as smooth as it should be, but even still, combat does break up the long bouts of exploration.
Click for larger image
Click for larger imageLara once again wields a dual pistol by default, although she can pick up weapons dropped by an enemy, and Eidos have attempted to make combat more interesting by adding a 'dodge endurance move', which allows her to jump out of the way just before she's attacked. Lara can strafe, dodge, roll, and lock onto targets like always and you can chain these moves together to create an impressive animation and also use a recovery move if she gets knocked down by one the creatures. The animations of Lara are well executed and the controls, apart from enemy switching, map well to the joy-pad, but combat is only exciting because the tempo of the music shifts up a gear.
Throughout the game you can pick up med-kits and artefacts which unlock some nice costumes for Lara, and the developers have done a fine job at enhancing the jagged graphics of the original into what must be said is one of the finest looking PS2 games that I've come across. Water looks fantastic, even when swimming in it, rocks crumble, fall and break in the way you'd expect and light reflects through small gaps in the roof of the caves casting shadows over the rocks. As mentioned earlier, Lara looks great and animates superbly and fluently when attempting her range of acrobatic manoeuvres.
