Lara Croft has come a cropper on her latest mission, sending shares in Eidos, the computer game star's owner, tumbling.

The company revealed yesterday that the launch of the PlayStation version of its new Tomb Raider game - The Angel of Darkness - would be delayed by about a month until July. This means most of the sales of the game will fall into the company's next financial year, so Eidos has "significantly reduced" its profit expectations for 2002-03.

The City, which had hoped recent problems at Eidos were at an end, was not impressed.

"We believed Eidos had turned the corner in 2002 and that the company was now able to meet its release deadlines," analysts at Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein said. "This has transpired not to be the case. Huge uncertainty exists."

Deutsche Bank has slashed its profit forecast for the current year by 48% to £10.1m and left its estimate for 2004 unchanged at £18.3m. It has set a target price on the shares of 120p. Yesterday Eidos shares fell 5.75p to 132.5p.

Despite the problems, Eidos attempted to put on a Lara-like show of bravado, saying it still expected to ship 1m copies of the PS2 version of the game in July. It has already launched the version in the US, and PC editions are due before the end of the month.

It also hopes to benefit from the expected hype for the film sequel to Tomb Raider, The Cradle of Life, which is due in cinemas later this summer, and believes the total sales figures for the game will still meet its targets.

"It just means the sales will transfer into next year," a spokesman said.

He blamed the problem on the complexities of European approval.

"There are five languages involved and they are all on the same disk. There was a problem with one of the languages which caused a delay. Until you get to the final processing you don't necessarily find this out."

The company said it had released its game based on The Italian Job ahead of schedule, cashing in on the recent remake of the 1969 film classic.