Tomb Raider: Anniversary

Lara Croft, eh? A gorgeous brunette with heaving breasts and a pert bottom, lovingly accentuated by a tight t-shirt and the shortest of shorts.

Can you really accuse us of sexism for pointing this out, though? Publisher Eidos has historically done everything possible to call attention to her charms. If they weren't hiring bimbos to dress up as Lara and pose for the cameras (sorry Angelina), they'd be getting fashion shoots published in magazines with Ms Croft wearing nowt but a handkerchief and a coy smile.

If hackles were raised, Eidos would wink and counter that, "She's a feminist icon! With guns!" Somewhere along the way it'd forgotten The Point. How the game plays is the thing, and funnily enough, a mobile phone is the best place to prove it.

With Lara stripped down to a sprite, a dozen or so pixels high, the developer can't dazzle us with the holy trinity of tits/ass/guns. It has to be creative and find other ways to keep our attention.

So does Anniversary make an impression? Well, it does and it doesn't. Lara's been shrunk down to a tiny, if reasonably well-defined form, with a deep orange tan and bobbing ponytail. Of course, there are still plenty of platforms to jump, blocks to push and puzzles to solve. In this respect it's very much a Tomb Raider game, right down to the familiar grunt Lara makes each time she leaps. Indeed, some of the stages are ingeniously designed, and require no small amount of concentration and practice to solve them.

You'll be climbing up and down ladders, leaping across chasms, dodging arrows, shooting mechanisms and riding up and down on moving platforms to your heart's content. And even considering the complexity of what you're getting up to, the controls are solid and work well in conjunction with the block-based environments, which generally place you in the correct positions to jump and climb.

But what is frustrating, however, is just how tough and unforgiving this game is.

Of the 15 tombs available, even the first offers enough opportunities for immediate falling death to be on the wrong side of challenging – something that becomes very tricky when you head into huge cavernous levels. Sadly, there are no checkpoints to save your progress midway.

This might not be a problem if Lara's physical resiliency weren't so pathetic; a mistimed leap here or a dog bite there and she goes down like a sack of potatoes. She does have a health bar and there's the occasional health pick-up but these only deal with small accidents. Anything more than a couple of blocks' fall and it's right back to the entrance of the tomb.

In this context, another thing that really grates is how your health level is carried over from the previous stage, which immediately leaves players at a disadvantage. Essentially you have to do every level nigh-on perfectly to have enough health to properly attempt the next.

And if you decide to attempt an earlier level to solve this problem, you lose access to all the later levels you've unlocked, both in the main Adventure mode, as well as in the Arcade and Time Trial alternatives.

It's plain to see the developer, new outfit Finblade (which consists staff from respected studio IOMO) wanted to make Anniversary as difficult and as challenging as possible. That's a respectable goal, but there's also a danger of taking things so far that it stops being entertaining and starts being a chore.

So effectively, what we're trying to say, in a roundabout sort of way, and we'll get to the point eventually, is bring back the curves.

If it's a choice between playing a game that's punishingly difficult or admiring the undulating contours of Lara Croft's buttocks, then we'd have to choose the latter. (Although, of course, we'd prefer the embrace of a slightly more accommodating game instead.)