Bland and hackneyed, but mildly entertaining nonetheless.
The game revolves around Lara's pursuit of a string of clues left behind by her father in his search for her mother. The action takes you from the waters of the Mediterranean to the jungles of Thailand to the tundra of the frosty Arctic, tracking down artifacts from Norse mythology. While the potential for some excellent storytelling exists, it never fully takes shape. The story itself is too forced, each cutscene making huge leaps in logic that don't naturally emerge from the action in the game. It's almost as if the gameplay and the cutscenes are telling two different stories.
The game is a mixed bag. It's visually attractive, with some nice, epic-scale panoramas and interesting details. The animation/mo-cap is solid, and the controls are pretty basic and fluid. The camera, however, totally sucks. Throughout the game I was constantly fighting with the camera control, and after a while it became totally frustrating. The voice acting is bland, and the sound-mixing is pretty bad, with actors' voices being overwhelmed with sound effects and music such that you couldn't hear major plot points being discussed. The characters are written rather one-dimensionally, and I couldn't really bring myself to care about anything that was happening on screen.
Though Tomb Raider may have been the pioneer of the puzzle-based archaeological action-adventure sub-genre, it has since lost its innovative luster. It is completely bereft of the cleverness and originality of its heir-apparent, the Uncharted series. While it still has some nice cinematic cut-scenes, and some mildly interesting gameplay, for the most part Tomb Raider: Underworld is a completely unremarkable game.