I'm relieved that here at Eidos we have two great internal engines - one from IO Interactive and one from Crystal. We chose the Crystal engine because we plan to help develop this engine more and then share it back with the rest of the company, the other Eidos studios. Having that technology from the start gives us a great advantage and foundation for our coders - there are no doubts about the approach, and we have few uncertainties. We just want to all work together on improving the same technology as we develop our game.

If you're like me and only peripherally aware of the Tomb Raider games and what the engine can do, aside from the obvious knack for curved surface meshes, you may want to take a browse ... just make sure you have safesearch turned on.

Naturally TR has nothing of the look/feel that DX would require, but that is purely an art-direction enigma, not a rendering technology one. My only concern, or in this case lack thereof, is the Crysis-factor which eidos is possibly avoiding by choosing this engine. I don't know about everyone else, but a new game that does not require hardware upgrades to run is music to my ears.

Edit ---

It turns out that this engine is not a stranger to dark urban environments, and in fact one of the TR games which uses it did present us with a Deus-Exish Tokyo level. The thumbnails are cropped, but the screens are not. Both have been de-Lara'd. These shots are several generations of the engine old of course, but I think the idea that it's capable of rendering these types of environments has been made plain. However, it still falls upon the art direction and level designers to make it happen. On the other hand, these shots look far more true to Deus Ex than Invisible War did.