Tomb Raider Legend - The Last Preview
The original Tomb Raider was a landmark game in every way. It catapulted the 3D platform adventure genre to great heights and set a new standard for female lead characters in video games. Over the years, the Tomb Raider style has been copied and improved on by many publishers, that is, except for Eidos themselves. In fact the later sequels have just been cash-ins on the Lara Croft name with mediocre gameplay and none of the spirit that made the first game so popular.
Now the torch has been handed to Crystal Dynamics to try and bring Lara Croft back to her deserved glory and stardom. This'll be the first time that someone other than Core has developed a Tomb Raider game. Will Crystal Dynamics succeed in their quest to fix the franchise or has it just been played out for too long. Can the addition of Lara's creator Toby Gard to the development team put her back on track? Read on to find out.
 | NOTE: Toby Gard joined the Crystal Dynamics team originally as a consultant. Once he saw where the team was taking the series he couldn't help but strap his apron on and hop back in the kitchen. He worked side by side with the team to rework the story, tweak the gameplay and help define Lara's new look. The end result? About as close to the excitement of the original PS1 title as you're gonna get! |
Temple of Doom
The preview build we received starts out with Lara scaling a huge cliff in Bolivia. She got tipped off that somewhere on this mountainside resides a secret temple that contains the ancient stone dias of Tiwanaku. Gesundheit! After much jumping and climbing (hey, it's a tomb raider game after all), Lara discovers that a bunch of heavily armed mercenaries have already commandeered the temple. What do the mercenaries want with the temple and possibly the stone dias? It's up to our heroine Lara to take things into her own hands and find out!
Montezuma's Revenge
You can tell right off the bat that Crystal Dynamics did their homework, as the game feels and plays very much like the original Tomb Raider. [Thank You Toby Gard! – ED] It's a wonder that they were able to accomplish this. The controls feel the same, but are much tighter. It's actually fun to control Lara and have her do all that jumping and scaling over rocks and ruins. Oh, you're still gonna fall. A lot in fact, but exploring isn't the chore that it used to be.
Lara still has her ol' big bag of tricks. Skills include the usual ledge grabbing, vine swinging, and rock pushing. She's still packin' her magic dual pistols that never seem to run out of ammo. Other items of note are some super binoculars that can be used to help figure out puzzles and a magnetic grapple that can attach to really shiny objects.
Tomb Raider: Legend is currently slated for just about every console known to mankind. We'll see the PC, Xbox, Xbox 360, and PS2 versions on April 11th, with the PSP version to follow soon after. Later this year, Eidos will even release Nintendo versions of the game (Gamecube, DS, and GBA.) Well, how about that! I got to test out the PS2 and Xbox 360 versions. Both games look fantastic when compared to what that particular system can handle.
PS2 owners, if you have a fancy enough television set, do yourself a favor and run the game in progressive scan mode. The difference is huge enough and really smoothes all those jaggies right out, putting it not far off graphically from its Xbox cousins. Framerate is a bit hit and miss, though. Even the Xbox 360 version tends to chug every so often, especially when it's pumped up to 1080i. 30fps seems a little pathetic on next-gen hardware. It really doesn't deter from the gameplay, though, I guess that's what really matters.
Fortune and Glory
It would seem that Toby Gard and Crystal Dynamics are doing their best to bring the series back to its roots. At first glance it seems like nothing has changed, but in fact so much has. Everything is just so well incorporated into the game that you don't notice it until you realize you're playing a Tomb Raider game and haven't smashed your controller in frustration and are actually having fun. I'm looking forward to the final version to see just what it has to offer in terms of level variety and story. If the same amount of care went into the remainder of the games levels as was evident in those I've experienced in the our preview build, then we can be certain that Tomb Raider Legend will be the best Tomb Raider that we've seen in a long, long time.
Welcome Back Lara!
-NakedBob
