Tomb Raider Underworld: Beneath the Ashes

Water features heavily, but the real star of the puzzles is Lara's grappling hook, which, despite excited PR chatter that it could bend and flex realistically around objects, never really came into its own in Underworld. Ashes more than makes up for it, using it not just for bursts of beam-swinging and wall-running, but as the missing ingredient in many of the game's most challenging moments - one of them, a spatial conundrum involving a handful of statues and some embossed plates, is so fiendishly simple it almost ranks amongst Tomb Raider's best.

Sadly, there's a fair amount of shooting, too, with Lara typically vigorous when it comes to thinning out the local ecosystem. It adds a change of pace, but never any sense of challenge, and the cramped locations mean that you can't even enjoy a few sticky grenades without blowing your own head off. There's not enough combat for it to become a deal-breaker, but if I were Lara, I'd definitely be organising a meeting with my ground staff in order to discuss how quite so many giant spiders and zombie Templars managed to end up hanging out under my floorboards.

With all the puzzles and gunplay going on, the pleasures of pure gymnastics are slightly sidetracked. There's plenty to climb and a fair amount of tricky jumping about to be had, but the lithe joy of chaining together a prolonged run of perfect springs, leaps and flips is largely absent. That's possibly a blessing, however, because, as the underground setting suggests, this is a very dark game, with an environment that has a nasty habit of blurring into shadows. It's atmospheric enough, and entirely expected in an episode about exploring a catacomb, but after the fifth time you miss a murky handhold because it blends invisibly with the murky wall in a murky corner, you may find yourself wishing whoever built the place had found time to install decent overheads when he was sticking in the giant waterwheel and the spike pits.

As well as being gloomy, the setting is also increasingly samey, which makes it too easy to get sucked into that familiar Tomb Raider fear that you've somehow managed to get yourself turned around and are now valiantly check-pointing your way back to the start of the level. It's annoying to get lost in any game, but to get lost in one as fleeting as this is particularly irritating.

For those (understandably) approaching this with stopwatches out and Microsoft Points To Entertainment Minutes conversion tables ready, I clocked Beneath the Ashes (800 MSP / GBP 6.80 / EUR 9.60) in two hours and twenty-four - and those less cloddish than me can probably lose the last quarter of an hour, as I do like to spend a lot of time getting stuck on geometry, backing into chasms, and looking the wrong way during gunfights. But while it's a little less than the three-to-six-hour time-frame the development team has been promising - unless I've magically become a better Tomb Raider than I was before - the first DLC episode still manages to feel like a complete package. It's polished, snappy, and often clever, and it happily avoids Underworld's strange fascination with having you work your way into a location and then plod all the way back out again - an unlovely bit of padding that more often than not failed to justify itself in terms of sheer excitement.