Good to have you back, sweetie pie. New Lara Croft is sexier, curvier, easier to move about and a joy to be seeing again. She's no moody prince. She's not a sulking ninja with problems relating to other people. She hasn't got a stealthy bone in her whole glorious body, and yes, she's still got the hourglass physique all the - archaeologists can't wait to get their trowels stuck into. She's Lara Croft, this is Tomb Raider, and you're about to get one hell of a stylish adventure.

The first mission is classic Tomb Raider. You're in the decaying temple of Tiwanaku, a crumbling, overgrown mess of gnarled old trees and hanging vines in deepest Bolivia. This is what it's all about! You're chasing a bloke called Rutland, trying to gather pieces of some old magical sword or other. That's all the story there is to Tomb Raider: Legend, thanks to it ditching all the ludicrous plots of the last few games (like the one where she died!) and starting again. Here we get Lara Croft Year One - an adventure to find out how her mother died by rebuilding the device that killed her.

A few flashbacks to young pre-teen Lara and one level where you 'play the past' are all the references to previous Lara Croft history in here, with the short, to-the-point plot keeping things brief and moving along at a scorching pace. It's a sensible story that gives you a reason for jetting between Bolivia, Peru, Kazakhstan and the deepest darkest comers of, er, Cornwall.

First up is Tiwanaku, where you learn how Lara's skills have come on, and it's immediately obvious that she’s the most user-friendly Lara Croft we've ever made do things. She's loads more manoeuvrable than before, which makes the game less frustrating and more welcoming to everyone regardless of skill, age or familiarity with the series.

The old grid-based Lara Croft control system that had you lumbering around the locations in squares has gone, freeing you to explore the exciting world of angles. You no longer have to be perfectly placed to make a jump, thanks to this more nimble Lara and her ability to lock onto ledges and turn in the air. She doesn’t stumble forward like a newborn lamb at every touch of the controller, either. She's fully able!

Lara now comes with different animations depending on how close you were to missing the jump, making her twist in the air and reach a little further to save the day if you weren't facing in quite the right way at take-off. It's great to see and very nice to not plummet to your death if you're slightly off line. In fact, it all feels almost exactly the same to play as the rather top-notch Prince Of Persia series, with all fiddly control moments ditched in favour of a lead character who does things automatically.

She'll grab the edge of traps and cliffs instead of plummeting off, lock onto distant ledges with one hand while demanding you quickly press the Y button to tighten her grip and stop her falling, and there are all kinds of glinting scenery objects gently prodding you in the right direction. It's archaeology for beginners, and great fun it is too.

There's no awkward rucksack system either - all your possessions are organised on the D-pad. Pressing Up gives you a health pack, Right brings up Lara's binoculars, and you can also swap weapons in this way too. The pause menu no longer has to be called up every few seconds, and you can tell what weapons Lara's packing in reserve - they're slung over her shoulder, not packed away in the old non-existent backpack.

She also has a grappling hook, which can be combined with a double-jump move to swing over chasms, or used on its own to grab distant lumps of scenery and pull them down. Again, it's easy to use and is always called into action via a big, floating A button in the sky to let you know when Lara fancies a grapple. The Bolivian training mission also lets you know one other important thing - puzzles are still a big thing in Lara's world.

At least, a certain kind of puzzle is, the one where you have to move heavy things onto switches on the floor. Oh look, it's another one of those puzzles where you have to move heavy things onto switches on the floor. This happens all the time. Enter a new room, factory, military base or temple, and there’s a few seconds of acclimatisation before you realise you'll be doing the same thing in this room as you did in the last place - climb around, find some switches, move heavy things onto said switches and progress.

We're willing Tomb Raider to be a great game, we're loving the atmosphere and look and aching for something amazing to happen, then we get another puzzle where you have to place a certain number of things on a certain number of switches on the floor, just like you did ten minutes ago. It's a bit disappointing, and we're not sure if the makers are ironically acknowledging the cliché-packed history of the Tomb Raider series, or simply haven't got any ideas for puzzles other than placing things on top of switches.

We're being harsh, but that does happen. At least there are a few other things, some cleverer things and a few puzzles that are a bit different to lighten the load. Japan finds Lara climbing around the outside of a building, using her new grappling hook thing to grab untethered dangling platforms, pull them towards her and use their swinging momentum to leap onto the next. This sort of grappling puzzle crops up often, and you also get to take apart a few established platform game devices - pushing blocks into machinery to stop those old crushing spike things from mashing you, along with an extremely creative use of a forklift truck. For every tedious old thing-placing puzzle, there's a cute little new touch to balance it out.

The combat sections are disappointing, though, and there's no good stuff to balance them out. Lara has a selection of guns and can nick them off dead enemies, but none of them alter the feel of action. Every shooting bit has you strafing from side to side, using the Left trigger lock-on facility and firing constantly. You also have grenades, but they take too long to go off so you're better off with the gun. You have melee attacks too, but the gun is quicker so you stick with it. There is only the gun. Don't bother being tactical or clever, just strafe and shoot.

These shooty sections also make up Tomb Raider's boss fight events, so you're stuck with strafing around in big circles while holding down the shoot button to win the occasional bad guy face-off. Not particularly exciting or thrilling, those. You will also enjoy the rather well-trodden experience of finding your way past leaking gas pipes in the Kazakhstan military base, and searching for power sources to switch on devices you need. Then doing the same thing in the next level, only in a destroyed Cornish gift shop. Where have all the new ideas gone?

Once you're done with the missions there's more to keep you busy thanks to Croft Mansion - Lara's home, and a separate little puzzle level for you to play at your own pace. You can mess around in the gym, make her wear that sexy evening dress from the Tokyo mission and chuck her in the swimming pool, or explore - and that last one is the proper idea. Croft Mansion, and every one of the game's missions, contains lots of hidden little items in those out-of-reach, only-accessible-via-a-torturous-diversion places. Collecting all of these is what the makers will have you do, and should you be so bothered, the game's longevity is massively boosted.

Croft Mansion also underlines what a star Lara Croft is. It's just plain fun to climb around the furniture while accompanied by Lara's sexy grunts and some laid-back Enya music. New wings of the country estate open up when you complete single-player missions, and the mansion is gigantic - exploring it to its fullest is bigger than any of the game's proper missions.

Checking out the mansion is also the only time you're left alone to think up your own solutions to puzzles and problems. In the regular game on Normal difficulty you're constantly told what to do and where to go. Even after five or six hours of play little arrows and pop-up help icons appear when you enter a new room, patronising you somewhat and making it all more like following a trail of Smarties around a map than thinking for yourself.

Lara's new electronic binoculars make things easier still, clues flashing up when you look through them in the unlikely event that you need a bit of assistance. You almost certainly won't - this is a game that you can cut through in, we reckon, well under ten hours.

Another new and slightly dumbed-down enhancement are the action sequences, where all you do is press the button that appears on the screen. Cut-scenes pop up occasionally where you're not in control of Lara, like the Japanese motorbike-jumping scene. Here, Lara has to leap off the bike at the right time to avoid killing herself. So a big, blue X button appears over her head at the right time, telling you to press X. It's hardly demanding on your gaming skills, that.

And that's a problem we had throughout Tomb Raider: Legend. It's so slick, so user-friendly and so nice that you hardly ever find yourself stuck, lost or dying very much. Lara’s so agile she can grab onto ledges easily so the platform stuff's a breeze, your flash binoculars give you clues if you're a bit lost, and the shooting bits are easy to get through as long as you keep the trigger held down and dodge from side to side constantly. It's like the Prince Of Persia games, really - Tomb Raider: Legend is an experience that relies on atmosphere rather than complexity. Thankfully, atmosphere is the one thing Tomb Raider has in huge quantities.

The camera's good for starters. Tomb Raider: Legend uses a mixture of moving and fixed shots, switching to fixed perspectives when some sort of environment event is happening. We never found it a problem, and the only time we had to resort to manually controlling the camera with the Right analogue stick was when zooming it around Lara to get better views of her body parts. For review purposes of course.

Talking of which... ay carumba! She gets ten out of ten for bootyliciousness. New-look Lara Croft is sensational, and an amazing improvement on past versions of the posh totty. When she's wearing her saucy evening dress in Tokyo you can see... everything, and we're happy to report that's she's (a) all there and (b) all good. The makers have made much noise about reducing certain parts of her body so she's more realistic, but from certain angles Lara's still quite unbelievably generously proportioned. Not that having whopping footballs-for-breasts impacts on the game in any way, we're just letting Croft fetishists know they're in for a treat.

And Lara Croft herself is the biggest factor in contributing to the game's feel. She's brilliantly animated. Her range of expressions is fantastic, the lip-synching of her gob movements and the dialogue have been pulled off superbly well, and she's just a general delight to watch move and act. Cut-scenes zoom right in on her face, and although her eyes are still a bit too big for her face and probably a bit too far apart, she's still a completely captivating character.

This impressive look extends from Lara out into the rest of the game world. This is by far the slickest a Tomb Raider game has ever looked, with Xbox adding depth, distance and quite superb visual effects to everything. Shadows are cast along walls and floors in the darker dungeons, Lara’s little torch illuminates the scenery very well, and you're always left impressed by how far you can see into the distance and how detailed the things all the way over there are.

Tomb Raider: Legend looks great, but we can't help wishing there was a bit more to do. A few more innovative puzzles. There are a couple of motorbike racing sections, which are a nice change of pace but aren't particularly thrilling. Did you ever see the awful Tomb Raider movie? There's a idiotic bit in that where Lara gets on her motorbike to travel from Place A to Place B. It's kind of pointless, as is the bike race bit here. You race and shoot, being careful not to hit the rocks, else you have to start again. A is accelerate and Y is your special shoot button, which should tell you exactly how good these bits are. Ever tried pressing A and Y together. Doesn't really go, does it?

No, Tomb Raider: Legend is at its best when you're exploring temples and climbing about enjoying controlling Lara, not when you're machine-gunning generic black-wearing bad guys or playing needless diversionary missions. When you're in a temple, listening to slow, gentle pipe music and watching the busty lady pulling levers with an erotic grunt, it's captivating, just like it always has been. No idea why, it just is. That's why Lara Croft is the most famous woman in games. She's got the 'it' factor that makes you love her, even when she's wearing a pair of boring old trousers in the icy Kazakhstan level.

Outside of climbing around temples, though, things aren't quite so mesmerising, with those dodgy motorbike bits, average gun combat moments and grey ice missions ruining the classic Tomb Raider vibe. It's also not a particularly large game. Playing on Normal difficulty and not really bothering to collect all the hidden secret bits you'll get around ten hours of play out of it, and the huge number of checkpoints, placed around pretty much every corner, ensure that there's very little in the way of retracing your steps.

Lara Croft's comeback adventure is an extremely polished, well presented package, containing all the usual action game elements, a decent story and, of course, the chance to look at Lara's lovely bottom as she climbs up ropes. It's amazingly easy to play, user-friendly, good fun and looks great throughout, but you may find yourself completing it in a couple of sittings. If you want a classy game that's a joy from start to finish and aren't looking for size or innovation, Tomb Raider: Legend is a top choice.

1. New Lara is incredibly well animated, with great lip-synching and cool facial expressions making Her Royal Loveliness look superb.
2. The brand new control system is super-slick, making this the most enjoyable and frustration-free Tomb Raider yet.
3. The look of the game is up there with the very best of Xbox - and it has the atmosphere sound you expect too.
4. Extra features like the Croft Mansion free-roaming game and the unlockable stuff adds an extra layer of amusement once it's beaten.

1. It's all pretty short and rather easy to cut through, with well-signposted puzzles and ridiculously weak enemies.

Short but otherwise perfectly formed, this is the slickest and classiest platform game of the year so far.