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(More customer reviews)I have been a Tomb Raider fan since the beginning. I fell in love with Ms. Croft the second she unsheathed those dual pistols, just as many other gamers did back in 1996, and followed her to her ungainly demise. After Tomb Raider III, I sat back and lamented the fall in quality, silently hoping Eidos would either just kill the series altogether or find a way to make it work.
Tomb Raider: Legend (the seventh iteration) finds itself in the hands of Crystal Dynamics. Thank god for them, too; they take what was great about the original and revamp it into a good, if not necessarily brilliant, game.
We gain more backstory for Lady Croft in this game than we have in the past. When she was a small girl she and her mother suffered a plane crash in the Nepal. While trying to reach safety, they come accross an artifact that whisks Lara's mom into some strange portal, never to be seen again. It's not consistent with the previous games, but given their lack of interest in a cohesive storyline, that's not a bad thing.
The voice acting is usually quite good, especially on the part of Ms. Croft. To her benefit ( or detriment, depending on your personal prefference), she is alwasy in contact via an earpiece/camera with her comrades back home, so there is always dialogue being delivered. It helps to keep the mood light, and the writing can be funny at times, but it sometimes comes off as corny. Based on various reviews, it's bound to be a love-it-or-hate-it kind of device. Personally, I think it helped flesh out Lara as a character (let's face it; irregardless of her physical form, we don't know much about her, really), but I understand why others might not have.
The graphics are all very good, sometimes bordering on gorgeous. The PC version may look either the best or the worst, depending on your system. For me, it looked great, but on lower-end systems, it might look like a first generation PS2 game. There were slowdowns at times, but nothing that broke up the gameplay.
Thankfully, gameplay can really be a lot of fun. Thanks to the new physics engine, what might have been a typical "insert key in slot A, after backtracking through three levels, then move X number of boxes onto switches" kind of game, the environmental puzzles are much more interesting. The game borrows very heavily from the Prince of Persia games in terms of control and platforming, which is a great thing. Controlling Lara no longer feels like driving a tank, and the mouse-and-keyboard combination is standard. It's not all that original, and Lara isn't as capable a gymnast as the Prince, but it's certainly a step in the right direction.
The downside to gameplay are the now legendary god-awful motorcycle levels. There are only two of them, thank god, but they are absolutely terrible. The graphics get a major downgrade, control is wonky, and they are much too long for their own good. They aren't enough to make you stop playing, but they should have been omitted. Clearly Crystal Dynamics were sold on their "hot chick on a bike" stereotype. The gunplay needs work, too. While it's certainly an improvement on the original's, it's very easy. There is a nifty bullet-time effect you can activate, but it gets old after the 80th enemy you kill using it.
The game is also over far too soon. If it were about ten hours longer than it is, I would have given the fun factor a five, but as is, it simply isn't long enough. It only took me five and a half hours to complete the first time through, although other reviewers have quoted even double that time. Perhaps it's because I'm a Tomb Raider veteran (as well as Prince of Persia veteran), but I simply couldn't imagine it taking anybody, even on the hardest difficulty level, ten hours to complete. The Croft Mansion makes a return, too (with the design of the movie's mansion, rather than the original one we're all so used to), and it is a lot of fun to search through. It might not take too terribly long, either, to discover all the secrets, but it's a nice distraction.
I also get the feeling that this is a test for Eidos to see whether or not to greenlight development on a sequel. The story ends on a cliffhanger, and as a whole it feels episodic. I wouldn't mind seeing a sequel, though, as long as those darned bike levels were removed. At last a Lara Croft game worth its wait in cardboard!
Pros:
Great graphics
Fun gameplay
Better storyline than in the past
Great return to form
Cons:
Terrible motorcycle levels
Far too short
No incentive to replay
Gunplay is weak
Hopefully the next Lara game (we all know there will be one) will utilize the great things this game does, and improve on its weaknesses.
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Gaming's most famous heroine makes her triumphant return in Lara Croft Tomb Raider: Legend! Lara Croft travels the globe in search of an ancient artifact and is pitted against rival forces. Lara returns to the tombs! Lara's new quest brings her to lost ancient realms that guard Secrets of the Past. The revamped control system provides intuitive and fluid character movement.
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