The waiting is over: Lara Croft’s original adventures- now revamped to meet next-gen demands- are now in stores, celebrating more than 10 years of fruitful dominance on the action-adventure games market.

Tomb Raider: Anniversary makes a turn back in time, but, just as the official trailer suggests, this time it’s different. And there are a lot of good things to mention: the game has been optimized to run smoothly even on less powerful PCs, so the problems that have plagued the previous game in the long series (Tomb Raider: Legend, which has received at least three patches to solve the next-gen compatibility for Nvidia-powered PCs) are now a thing of the past. Although textures in the game could have been better, producers concentrated more on adding new content to Lara’s original tomb-raiding experience rather that providing a more realistic look to the environments (which is not necessarily a bad thing; sometimes, having a quad core CPU and insanely huge amounts of system and video RAM does not proportionally secure the fun in the gameplay…).

Crystal Dynamics, the developers of the game, have included Peru, Greece and Egypt- the original levels from the 1996 game- but have also added new levels, with multiple playthrough options.

The creatures in the game diversified: bears, wolves, crocodiles and even dinosaurs like T-Rex are now facing Lara’s pistols, while resurrected mummies add up to the supernatural arsenal of foes. Their behavior has been improved for more diversified responses, providing improved combat challenges for the player.

The original Tomb Raider game designer, Toby Gard and Tomb Raider: Anniversary’s Game Director Jason Botta from Crystal Dynamics, provides an unlockable commentary on how this game was made, with some previously undisclosed secrets from Toby about the original Tomb Raider game.

The game is currently available for PC, PS2 and the PSP, while a Wii version is in the works and should be available later this year. However, ESRB's site also hints at a possible Xbox 360 port, which will apparently be divided into five parts: one dedicated to Peru, the Lost City, Greece, Egypt, and Croft Manor.