New Tomb Raider: Underworld trailer asks 'What could Lara do?'

If the question were "What would Lara do," the answer would be simple: climb things, flip around, and shoot stuff. Oh, and activate switches. All while looking very pretty, of course. The question posed by Tomb Raider: Underworld's design team at Crystal Dynamics in this new trailer, however, is "What could Lara do?" As in, if she were a real, super-athletic, flesh-and-blood lady adventurer.

The answers turn out to be some things we've heard about before, like the fact that she can now pull herself up onto poles and balance-walk them. The real treat of this trailer is seeing the latest animation pass in action. While Lara has been completely motion-captured for the first time in this outing, there's still a lot of work that's gone into hand-tweaking her 2,000-odd animations. We think the results look pretty darn great – if just a little too quick for natural human movement – compared to her animation in earlier builds. What do you think?