I've never meant to do a serious analysis or review of a game before, but I saw a lot of people destroying this game (some with valid reasons), but many using very dumb arguments to justify it.

Is TR: AOD an excellent game? Not really. Is it bad? It'll depend. Is it a good Tomb Raider game? Yes, it definitely is.

As everyone is aware of, Core Design faced some very difficult deadlines and rush for the game to be released from Eidos. The game pitch was a very - VERY - ambitious and you can see it pretty much throughout this whole game, but from all the rush that Core team received what we got was an incomplete piece of something that could've been one of the best games from it's era.

Gameplay/Mechanics: It's well known in the TR series, at least the ones from the classic era, that with a new game doesn't actually mean a 100% new mechanics. Most of the times is a new adventure with some new (New clothes for Lara, weapons, move set). AOD is just like this, bringing a new dialogue system, UI and inventory, short and long jumps and a improvement of the old mechanics (kind of) to the new PS2 era.

Story: The story is very ok. I think I saw somewhere that due to the rush for the release a lot from the original script and plan had to be cut, and you can actually see it in the game itself. The first 2-3 hours of game and very well put together, story-whise, and are capable of creating a mystery of what happened to Von Croy and who killed him. Although as the game goes by you can see the rush to end it and even some very ugly and strange scenes like a normal Lara getting the classic glasses every now and then out of nowhere. The game takes 23 level out of 29 (about 10 hours of gameplay) to tell us the name of Kurtis, which was in the game since the very beginning. Don't get me wrong, the story is not horrible is just ok. A regular classic TR story arc, nothing more. Plus, the gothic horror it brings is very welcomed to the series.

Controls: Well boy, here we go. Here's where the game fucks itself. "The controls are a mess" is not enough to describe how bad and buggy they are. It's kind of a bought back to the TR1 but kind of worst. Core Design has always taken care with TR and when they knew that the controls where not the best they always added some feature to help the player with it (In TR1 it's hard and takes a long time to turn Lara to the opposite side that she's facing, then they added a fast roll button to change directions). Here we don't have this "help features" and everything and very sketchy, almost like a beta version. When you press forward, Lara will walk for some seconds before running, which can lead you to death in moments that you have to run or escape. Sometimes Lara jumps normally, other time she doesn't (I think it depends on her humor). Up to a point of the game I was able to get off of vents by walking back and pressing the action button, then all of a sudden i wasn't able to do it anymore. Overall, the controls are like a revival of the 1996 game with a low-budget but in 2003.

Graphics/animations: Here's where the game shines a lot. Lara model is fantastic, just like the levels, and most of here animations. You can see by the graphics what they were aiming for with this game.

Bugs: Believe it or not, I haven't faced a lot of them. From what I can remember, once Lara was making man noises instead of her usual moans when jumping (it later understood that it were the Kurtis jump noises and the game probably messed the audio tracks). Also, the game flow (an item or objective), disappeared twice for me, which made me walk around looking for what to do for a while before having to look it up in the internet and load a past save.

AOD is not a bad game at all. Of course, it's not even close of being perfect, but if you've played the 5 original Lara Croft's games this one is much like a expantion to it. It works, and it has it charms.

I saw a journalist from TheGamer (https://www.thegamer.com/tomb-raider-every-game-ranked/) saying that this was the "The game is also the first to feature no tombs, instead seeing Lara explore cities from Paris to Prague as she is on the run for the murder of her mentor." which is extremely dumb and shows how he hasn't even played the game since there's a level that's literally named "Tomb of the Ancients" and it's one of the bests from all of the classic games.

If you are a new player from the Survivor Lara Croft timeline, this might not be the game for you, not only for the messy controls but for the overall way it works (just like the classic TR), it's not for you. If you like TR give it a change, it's a cool game and it's not all this bad as a lot say it is, it's just unfinished and should be played with this in mind.

Also, it's nice to mention that fans are working on a 'definitive edition' that literally improves every aspect of the game, including the controls and story, and it is already looking amazing (it's not finished yet), so you might want to take a while before playing it, so you can enjoy the definitive edition (http://www.traodde.com).