Apart from those with a death wish who get their kicks out of extreme sports that involve vertigo-inducing heights and perilously steep gradients, does anyone really have a head for heights? All very well saying you have right now while in the cosy comfort of your favourite armchair, sipping tea while reading Play in your ground-floor living room, but what if you were at the top of the world’s tallest freestanding structure, the CN Tower in Toronto, standing on the glass floor in the Sky Pod at 446 metres? Or free-climbing the world’s tallest sea cliff, the Thumbnail in Greenland, at 1,500 metres? The thought is enough to make us go all pale and queasy.

It’s nothing to be ashamed of. In fact, it’s what Eidos has banked on for years with its Tomb Raider series. This primal fear within a safe context is an incredibly commercial product: we like to be afraid for the virtual life of the protagonist, and even more so when we know it’s modelled on a real-life goddess like Karima Adebibe. And we know we’re going to cause controversy when we say she’s the hottest Lara yet. Sorry Jolie, you’re like, sooo yesterday’s news.

When Crystal Dynamics picked up the gauntlet, we were dubious. The series had gone a little stale where the original developers Core Design had left it, and we didn’t see much that could be remedied – God knows it had been around for aeons, maybe it was time to call it a day. But in fairness, Crystal Dynamics has done a damn good job both in revitalising the series and resuscitating our interest in the game. This PSP reworking of the original Tomb Raider looks fantastic – and the extra animated details on Lara are impressive, performing all manner of impressive acrobatic flourishes when you’re controlling her, becoming increasingly mucky as you progress and dusting her legs off when she thinks you’re not looking. But this is no mere remake of a decade-old game that uses the Legend engine… it’s not been rewritten ground-up, admittedly, but this incarnation of Lara is experiencing a vastly different world than the original Lara had to deal with.

Tomb Raider Anniversary is big – bigger than its progenitor by quite some margin. And it makes the assumption that you’ve played previous Tomb Raider games, so there’s no comfortably increasing gradient. You’re given the Peru level to start with, an Incan-themed world that features far more peril than the original, in the form of hundreds of feet of gravity with rocks to break your fall. Greece and Egypt are more daunting still, particularly Egypt which is far more expansive than it ever was. You begin to appreciate at this point what new technology has done for an old game. Some areas are impossibly huge and the thought of finding a path through to the next area by scaling pillars and swinging from precipices sends your mind reeling.

But Lara is better equipped to deal with these situations this time around, even though she’s left her PDA and binoculars behind. Her grappling hook is employed frequently on the convenient hooks that pepper the walls in appropriate places and her physical prowess has improved dramatically too. Lara can leap upwards from handhold to handhold, swing across from ledge to ledge and even run short distances across walls using her grappling hook. It’s a display of acrobatic dexterity that’s almost on a par with the Prince Of Persia. Almost – mistiming a jump will see Lara scrabbling to maintain her purchase on a ledge, giving you an excruciating fraction of a second to tap the Triangle button to save her. And try any of the Prince’s death-defying leaps, or get carried away with the wall-running, and nothing will save you from plummeting to your doom.

Lara also gets a decent arsenal of weapons, including a pistol with infinite ammo, with which to fend off all sorts of endangered and protected species. Among these are lions, gorillas, crocodiles, centaurs and even the T-Rex again, which makes its cameo as a boss this time and can be killed with your guns.

But the age-old bugbear of camera control comes back to haunt this PSP version. The automatic camera frequently pans to an angle that obscures your view, forcing you to adjust it manually, and you can never quite see enough of your way ahead, especially when taking a run-up for a big jump. You can see some effort has been made to rectify the situation from previous games, but for a series that requires the bigger picture to play comfortably, our perspective is still quite restricted.

This is no small niggle in itself, but given that Tomb Raider: Anniversary pleases in so many other areas – critically in its gameplay that’s even tighter than before – it can be forgiven and accepted as a mere quirk of the game. This is Lara at the best we’ve seen her for a while, and we don’t think Tomb Raider fans need much more prompting than that.

Ben Biggs