Great levels and story, but the disastrous controls completely ruin the game
Unfortunately, the one big thing that kills the gameplay experience is the horrific controls. Simply put, Lara simply does not want to obey you at all. Many times she will run off the cliff when you are trying to stop and whenever you try to make her drop on a certain side of the beam, 90 percent of the time she will drop on the wrong side of it. It's like trial and error trying to get her in the proper position. The worst aspect of the controls is that when attempting to jump onto a perch or bar, she frequently jumps at an improper angle and falls to her death. Yeah, 150-200 deaths on one level is considered quite good by this game's standards. What could have taken 2-3 hours to complete the quest actually takes a good 8-12 hours due to the god-awful controls. In fact, it took me about 2.5 hours to finish Tomb Raider Legend despite it having more levels. Like seriously, even Mortal Kombat games on Game Boy have better controls than this for crying out loud. To add salt to its wounds, the levels themselves are really difficult. So difficult, in fact, that a strategy walkthrough guide is REQUIRED to play this game for the first five quests or so. Strangely enough, the final two chapters are actually the easiest in the game, but STILL harder than most levels in Tomb Raider Anniversary. The game crashes occasionally and I have to save my game at every checkpoint. Finally, there are no boss battles in this game. What? No boss battles?! What is an adventure game with no bosses? Like, please!
I wanted to like this game, but the extremely frustrating and annoying controls make the overall presentation a total letdown. If Eidos could release a patch that will fix the controls to TRL and TRA standards, then this will become a game that I would play every now and then. But after completing the quest, the game should be left well alone in hopes for a much improved sequel in the near future.