RandV
It's a wolf v2.0
Tomb Raider wasn't overrated in '96/'97. It was rather refreshing. When most 3D games were mindless shooters, Tomb Raider required some thinking.
To the complaints about unlimited ammo and it being slow-paced and boring, those are all because the original wasn't meant to be an action game as much as a puzzle-solving game. It was very much in the vein of Prince of Persia 1 & 2, just in 3D. There was action, but the core gameplay was solving puzzles to move from area to area. If you didn't enjoy puzzles so much, then you weren't going to like it so much.
Yeah I was going to make the Prince of Persia comparison. Not sure if it was the first game to do this or not but what made the original Prince of Persia unique was the precise motion capture movement. Movement and jumping didn't happen the moment you pressed the button, but rather flowed with the natural animation of the character on screen. Tom Raider took this concept and applied it to 3D, which with the newer technology provided far more interesting environments.
I genuinely enjoyed it for what it was, but I do doubt it would have been so successful without Lara's big rack leading the way. And I can proudly say that in high school unlike my friends I wasn't swayed by the shameless sexploitation.