Here’s a nice, meaty demo — so meaty, in fact, that I almost gave up on it a dozen times. It’s already hard enough to spark interest in a ten-year-old franchise whose gameplay has been basically unchanged all along (yeah, yeah, Lara has more moves, now she can shoot two targets at the same time and balance on the top of pillars, whatever); at the very least, you should cover the basics and make gameplay flawless, and Underworld is anything but that.

Sure, the graphics are slick (although rocks are still too blocky) and Lara has some nice animations (that would look state-of-the-art if Assassin’s Creed hadn’t been there before), but that’s just a pretty coat of paint on crumbling walls: it begins with invisible walls in the ocean of the opening sequence but goes on with imprecise, glitchy controls, a crappy camera, buggy enemies and very artificial level design only made worse by how good the graphics are: every time I got stuck (and that happened several times in the demo), it wasn’t because I had trouble figuring what I was supposed to do, but because I wasn’t sure if this or that ledge was decorative or Lara could jump to it, or whether this or that wall was firm enough for Lara to jump off from; all of it made worse by the camera constantly zooming in and out so that you lose all sense of perspective and have no idea whether you’re supposed to jump there or it’s going to kill you.

After I’d watched videos of this game, I was all prepared to like it, but it’s been an infuriating hour of playing the demo and I can’t imagine going through the whole game.