I got 45 minutes to play through an early part of the game and started by tracking a man through a busy South American village celebrating the Day of the Dead. It's notable to see Lara walking through a place populated with people, and not having to draw her bow or climbing ax. The village is teeming with people, detail and music -- it's alive. It also feels different to the bleak introductions we've seen in games past. Lara looks slightly more polished in this third outing, despite the early preview build I played on the Xbox One.

There are some heavy Keira Knightley vibes and she's still unmistakably British, in that she doesn't seem to speak a single word of Spanish. She mumbles 'sorry' as she bumps into people, talks at children and the rest of it. Lara can decipher ruins of ancient Mayan civilizations, but an incorrect if understandable 'disculpo' seems beyond her.

While the story does follow on from the two early games, you could join the series at this point and get up to speed pretty quickly. It's typical action movie stuff. The big bad is Trinity: They killed your father and are seeking out an apocalyptic... thing. Lara's hunting for it too, just to ensure the evil organization doesn't get to it. Thus, we're tomb raiding.

Following the stranger soon leads to an excavation site, armed guards and well, trouble. I shoot off two stealth kills (quick-time event style), which are well sign-posted, slick and effective. Quick time events, like in the rest of the trilogy, appear at heated points. You'll want to remember where the 'tool' button is, because that's going to save you from tricky moments scaling cliffs and jumping across chasms.

One of the criticisms of the second game is how you seem to shed all the hard-earned skills from the first game. The games' creators are stressing how these titles act as an origin story, but they still wiped the slate clean on each iteration. While the demo wasn't complete (no tool creation or experience points to assign), right from the outset Lara was wielding rope arrows, Molotov cocktails, several (!) guns and more. Hopefully this is a sign that Lara will start Shadow with the skills becoming of the tomb raider from decades past. She's been through enough in the first two games.

It's also good to see that there are indeed tombs, even in this short demo. Once you've traversed cliffs and had a particularly tense underwater dash, you're faced with a beautiful view of your next challenge: a Mayan pyramid. I found the puzzles challenging but achievable — most of my struggles came from forgetting the Xbox button layout and plummeting off cliffs or into spikes. I didn't manage to finish the demo, but I might have if I was using a DualShock. (That's my excuse and I'm sticking to it.)

Later in the demo, I tested out more stealth kills, weapons and well, more trying not to die. Picking off guards one by one is still your best strategy: I was able to take out three guys in a firefight, but was soon felled by countless other guards.