I bet they had to rework this animation hundreds of times before they were happy with it. I can just see the developers gathered round a monitor while someone was showing Lara pull herself up from a cliff. This is an incredibly difficult task to pull off, and you can tell that this was a painstaking process to get right.

The developers did an outstanding job making Lara look, act, react, and feel like a real person. I don't mean this in a polygon-perversion sort of way, either. Lara herself is one of the biggest overall improvements in the game. Everyone will have an opinion, but one thing will never be argued: Lara has definitely used some of her earnings to visit a specialized plastic surgeon, if you know what I mean. I do like this game better than the original in some areas, while I wish they would have remained more true to the original in other areas. I feel the same way about Tomb Raider II. Sure, it was a good game, and it was revolutionary to have a female lead character, but it did have some flaws. When the original Tomb Raider was released, I was one of the few people who was not sucked in by the hype. You'll need to be a Tomb Raider master to pass the later levels. With the exception of a few new moves, most notably her ability to climb, Lara controls the same as before (nope, no analog support). She faces a few more enemies, too, but the lethal environment (as well as a few awkward camera angles) still remains her greatest adversary. Lara also drives two vehicles, a boat and a snowmobile, during the course of the game, and you'll need both to solve some of the puzzles.

She's going to die-a lot-but now you can save the game at any point so you can immediately retry the tricky parts. Lara faces spiked pits, compacting spiked walls, rolling spiked disks and.well, just lots of spiked stuff in general. Where Tomb Raider's emphasis was on exploration, this one is all about traps, traps and more traps. And even when you think the game's done, you get an epilogue adventure (with Lara wearing her skimpiest outfit yet, by the way). Playing through TR2 is like running a marathon (indeed, after each level you're shown how far you've traveled by the very end, I had jogged 86 kilometers). At 18 levels, this sequel is about 30 percent larger than the first game.

Lara Croft's second outing may seem similar ' to the first, but TR2 actually packs a lot of subtle-and some not-so-subtle-differences that make it better than the original.

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