New Tomb Raider Gameplay Footage Surfaces

New gameplay footage from the new Tomb Raider has been released and uploaded onto Square Enix's website and Youtube.

Capping out at about eleven minutes, the video depicts Lara Croft as she escapes from a Monastery in order to save her friend Sam. What follows is probably just about the worst sequence of events that could happen to our injured heroine. She falls down a mountain, out of a plane, down a raging river, all while bleeding from her side and having to shoot bad guys. 

The injury makes the scene all that more suspenseful, as Lara has to limp her way through enemy territory in order to save her friend.   The true impact of the escape on the player obviously varies, but just watching the gameplay was difficult, but in a good way. This is a standard third-person shooter, but it is less about running in guns out than using the environment to create a strategy in order to take as little damage as possible. 

It's less a shooter and more about actually playing a game, which is something that can definitely work in Tomb Raider's favor. It stands apart from Uncharted, another third-person action-adventure shooter in which it has some obvious similarities, by building tension with injury and death-defying falls and acts of strength. While the injury doesn't seem to affect combat as much as it should, it could still have an impact on the player. 

Comments on the Youtube page seem to be criticizing the linear structure of the story, instead of having a more exploratory aspect, but that is something that can only be determined as a fault after playing the game.

More videos will be released down the road, but you could also wait until March 5 when the game is released for Xbox, PS3, and PC.