This was my first time playing any Tomb Raider game.
There's a great game buried behind awful controls and bad graphics. I wanted to beat it without a walkthrough, but the graphics made it almost impossible to find where you need to go in several places. I am not a fan of this control style (I think they're "tank controls"). I'm also not used to always having to move in the direction in relation to the character instead of the direction on screen -- I had a LOT of deaths because of this. This is the first game where I wished the default was to walk instead of run -- again, I died a LOT because I ran off a ledge because I forgot to push down the walk button when I just wanted to take one step forward.
The item recognition is dreadful. Unless Lara's shadow is covering the item on the ground that you want to pick up, she pretty much won't pick it up, even if it's laying 3 inches in front of her. If you aren't pressed right up against a switch, she won't activate it. Even activating the "Save Game Beacons" is a chore, as you'll sometimes find yourself slowly rotating around it for a while before you get in the correct position to use it.
I found some of the levels to be really brutal. The combat for the most part consists of just jumping back and forth or backwards firing your pistols, which have unlimited ammunition, which almost makes its addition pointless. Once I figured out that 3 walking steps backward from the edge will put you at the right distance to do a running jump for many gaps, it made the platforming aspect much easier. Most of the levels were fun to solve, notwithstanding the graphics problems. My copy started glitching during the final level where I would get vertical bars as a background instead of the paused and darkened screen when I accessed the game menu. It didn't cause any issues in the game as all the menu items weren't affected, but I think it was why I didn't see the End Credits -- my screen just looked like a Test Pattern for about 30 seconds.
