Eidos looking into Tomb Raider Wii bug

Eidos is investigating a glitch that stops players making progress in the Wii version of Tomb Raider: Underworld.

According to scattered reports and threads on the official forum, a horizontal bar that doubles as a lever is failing to appear towards the end of the Coastal Thailand level.

What should happen (as handily illustrated on YouTube - thanks Kotaku) is that Lara jumps onto a bar and her weight causes it to descend and open an underwater escape route. What happens on the Wii, in a small number of cases, is that no bar appears and Lara is trapped forever. Poor old Lara.

Fortunately, Eidos is looking into it according to representatives on the technical forum, and in the meantime support folks are advising players to try reverting to a previous save or to download a save-file and copy it onto an SD card to help get round it.

We've contacted Eidos for further comment.

For more on Tomb Raider: Underworld, check out our Tomb Raider: Underworld review. Short version: same old Lara with a few new tricks, but very pretty and you can strap a sticky-bomb to a tiger. Win.

UPDATE: Eidos has now issued a statement in which it says, "We are aware of a bug which is present in the Nintendo Wii version of Tomb Raider: Underworld. We would like to stress that this is an extremely infrequent bug, however on the rare occasion that it occurs; it affects the presence of a lever in the Thailand level of the game and prevents progress beyond this level.

"Eidos sincerely apologises to anyone who has experienced this frustrating problem. The quality of our games is paramount to us and the Nintendo Wii version of Tomb Raider: Underworld went through three separate QA testing departments prior to release. Regrettably anomalies such as this do occur occasionally in videogames despite the best efforts by publishers to avoid them.

"The good news is that it is not an unsolvable bug, so if you encounter it and it persists please visit www.eidosinteractive.co.uk/support/worldmap.html."