I'm in complete agreement with you there. TRU was a
huge miss for me. It was the "Angel of Darkness" of Crystal's TR series: overly ambitious, terribly executed.
In my eyes, it was definitely a screw-up-and-move-on type of game. Was it the inevitable nail in the LAU coffin? I don't think it had to be; TRL and TRA were good games in their own right. TRU was not a good game in
any right. In fact, I almost feel like the Legend-continuum would have ended up very similarly to the current reboot series if Crystal had continued to make TR their own way, without listening to any fan feedback. Some people are really hard on the Crystal team, but there is no denying that they listen to what the fans ask for and try to implement some of it. I mean they killed Alistair in TRU for us, after all.