With all due respect to the city of London, there’s a fair few places that I’d rather be on a soaking wet Thursday afternoon than a bustling Piccadilly Circus tube station. Being primarily a country boy my ventures into the big city tend to leave me feeling somewhat lost and confused, and it tends to be only the best of reasons that have me going there these days.

This time I have a pretty nifty reason indeed; I am off to a rather plush cinema to have a gander at the brand new Tomb Raider game, subtitled Underworld. With Crystal Dynamics having given the original Tomb Raider a pretty handy polish last year for Tomb Raider Anniversary, Lara’s adventures risk becoming en vogue once more and hence it’s with a great sense of anticipation and a mild sense of semi-drunken excitement that the majority of us scribes are guided from the bar toward the main screening room.

We’re given a brief introduction to the game by a rather excited P.R. chap whom I would have heard the name of had it not been for the panicked shuffling of pens, pads and laptops, before being handed over to Eidos’ Sarah Van Rompaey, who’s equally excited but in a more mellow, Australian kind of way. ‘What you’re seeing is the pre-Alpha 360 version’, we are informed, ‘of the fourth level of the game, in Mexico’. The screen fades in on the familiar shapely form of Lara, standing outside in the middle of what looks to be rather inclement weather. Oh well – at least she knows how most of us felt getting here.

The immediate impressions are good; graphically the game looks fantastic, with the rain drenching the newly modelled Lara and running down her arms. Running forward, she splashes through a puddle which ripples and sploshes rather satisfyingly. The muddy browns and soaked green textures of a jungle during monsoon season look really quite superb, as do the real-time lighting effects, and it doesn’t stop there either.

Running along a little path, Lara encounters some rather menacing black panthers. We’re informed that the main enemies Ms. Croft will encounter throughout the full version of this particular level are poachers and beasties, all benefiting from new AI that’ll see them being rather more than simple cannon fodder with the ability to scale vertical surfaces in their pursuit of you, and may even see them fighting between themselves at times. It certainly seems as if Lara’s having to do a great deal more dashing and shooting this time, so it’s lucky that she will have the ability to dual target multiple enemies, pick up items such as poles and sticks for melee combat and use sticky grenades to tip the balance in her favour.

At this point in my notes, I have simply written ‘nice arse’. Presuming this was to do with Lara and not the rather svelte public relations girl I ended up chatting to, I shall explain all. You see, this time Lara’s been toned down a bit, with more proportional cleavage (cue boos from all teenagers and frustrated middle-aged men worldwide), realistically moving hair and a rather darker, angrier look on her face that changes depending on the actions she is performing at the time. For the first time in the series, Crystal Dynamics have made use of motion capture data (from an competition gymnast, appropriately), and it really pays off, with Lara gliding and spiralling around really rather gracefully.

While this graphical prowess is promising, the way the whole thing seems to be tying itself up in terms of gameplay is just as exciting. Shortly after having polished off those marauding panthers – the bodies remain, supposedly, as a helpful guide for players to see where they’ve previously been - Lara is guided over to a menacing looking pole. Having picked it up and pottered around the outside of a looming temple (once again, looking absolutely beautiful) to discover that – gasp – there’s no apparent way in, our focus is guided up to a small but equally obvious indent in on of the pillars. Jamming the aforementioned pole into this indent allows Lara to swing off it and grab onto a small ledge, from which she can thus proceed to clamber around the temple like a kid on a climbing frame. This mechanic of using items to solve exploration-based quandaries is a key one, we are informed, and at this early stage it looks simple enough to carry out.

A bit of climbing later we’re introduced to another ‘key’ new feature that Underworld brings to the table: Free Climbing. Whereas in Tomb Raider games previously Lara has had to move along pretty rigid ledges and climbing surface with either direct horizontal or vertical progress, this time she can grab onto walls and move around in pretty much any direction she chooses, giving the player a heightened sense of freedom. Quite whether this is really the exciting prospect it’s supposed to be is open to conjecture – Lara is still restricted to climbing across areas with obvious protrusions or vegetation – but it’s still a step in the right direction.

Lara is guided off the wall she’s been shimmying along and onto a narrow beam, at which point we’re introduced to yet another now element in the game – the weather affecting surfaces. With the rain still pouring down, the beam Lara is trying to cross has become rather slippery, and to illustrate this she is manoeuvred slightly too close to the edge and slips, only just managing to grab onto it and haul herself up. Again, it’s far too early to know if this is going to be anything more than a nice touch of detail, but considering the rain also washes the mud from Lara should she stumble into a puddle and that storm clouds float across the sky in real time, it all adds to the sense of involvement with your surroundings.

In fact, one of the best things that this short demo of Underworld is showing us is that it seems to really isolate Lara and throw her against all manner of challenges. It’s my personal opinion (and that of many others, to be fair) that Tomb Raider games are at their finest when the player is given a tangible sense of loneliness whilst they traverse whatever cavern or temple they find themselves in, and Underworld really does seem to ooze that same sense of Lara being on her own against the elements. There may be the odd face-off against all kinds of enemies (including a face-hugging spider that extracted more than a few wry chuckles from the assembled hacks), but exploration, puzzling and landscape conquer seems to take the front seat.

We’re nearing the end of our demonstration now, but before the lights come up we are offered a few more morsels of what we can expect from the full product. Lara arrives at a room with a large, unreachable pillar in the middle, with a handy-looking rock placed upon it. By firing her grappling hook across the room and onto a surface opposite, the player is able to use Lara’s rope to push the rock off the pillar and into the room. According to Van Rompaey, the block itself is completely physics-affected, and will fall in a different place each time. Nice. Using this, Lara can access a crucial item that she will need to solve a puzzle later in the level.

Lara then comes across a rather conveniently placed motorbike, which she proceeds to ride at high speed toward her next objective. Quite how her bike got here is a matter for us to discover in the full product, supposedly, as is a promised ‘new use’ of the two-wheeled travel aid that we are not shown, although we are told that Lara can perform wheelies and change gear if she wishes. Arriving at her new destination, we’re guided up to a kind of large gearbox mounted upon the ground, with different size cogs that have been previously placed to save us having to watch the puzzle being solved in real-time, which is a little disappointing. Using the item she got her grubby mitts on earlier, Lara completes the mechanical system, opening a door across the way that leads to a Mayan Underworld. Then, then, then… the demo ends. It was just getting exciting, too!

From this, we are able to assume that the game bases itself firmly in Mayan mythology, something that could give us a rather beautiful set of landscapes and temples to explore. The use of the bike is intriguing as well, and potentially points to Lara having to explore vast open areas at times, which could lead to some pretty large scale puzzling.

What we’ve been shown today is a mere snippet of what’s to come, but it’s enough to suggest that Crystal Dynamics are certainly moving in the right direction with the series. A few questions remain in relation to exactly what the use of items in combat and navigation and the free climbing mechanic will bring to the game in terms of meaningful departures rather than simply being pleasant additions, but the sheer graphical loveliness, the atmosphere and the very nature of what we’ve had demonstrated looks pretty swell indeed. With a release date for the PS3, 360 and PC versions tentatively scratched in for late October we may all have a bit of a wait ahead of us, but rather like my train home it’s certainly something that looks like it should not be missed.