Menu is fine with me. I always enjoyed this kind of menu in all Tomb Raider games, no idea why but it feels so fun over the same old layout.

BUT, you should make everything controllable by mouse itself. I was pretty annoyed at how only few sections in the menus suddenly required me to leave the keyboard and turn to mouse. Or how to type the name I had to select a word (which makes no sense on a PC, it's console system purely) from a list instead of just typing my name while I am using the keyboard for everything anyway (unless there is a Gamepad only option this makes no sense at all).

The visuals are fine, though I found the textures to be too blurry for my taste, and lack of proper shadows (probably baked into models) on the ship. I think using normals/specular mapping will really up the visuals in this game (not that it doesn't look good, but it can be better).

Gameplay wise, the opening ship level reminded me of The Longest Journey. I got bored for some reason and the "training" part was so confusing. I didn't train anything, just selected few lines and poof, I was back on the ship, made no sense to me.

Personally I prefer to select race/skills/other rpg stuff in opening character creation screen in games like Baldur's Gate, or recently, Drakensang. It feels like less waste of a time than going through needless walking waking/walking and talking sequences.

To teach the player the control basics, you can always put practice dummies and a lot of barrels all over the place (ship felt way too small for so many warriors.. they are wearing that armor the whole trip? :P ). Everyone likes to break barrels and hit dummies when they are lvl-1.. and maybe find those stored apples.


I didn't progress any further than the ship cause it felt all too cryptic for no reason to me. But, it looks great, the controls are smooth (even though limited) and a choice of resolution in-game will help in the future demos.