Jonny drops the bombshell...
I have a bit of a confession to make. I never played Tomb Raider.
When Lara Croft's first adventure appeared back in on PlayStation back in '96, I turned my back on her. A devoted (or perhaps, blinkered) Nintendo gamer, she represented everything I hated about the changes that were taking place in the world of games at the time. Cool people calling themselves gamers? This had to stop!
My beloved Nintendo, and even the more streetwise Sega were left reeling by the PlayStation revolution, and, flanked by the likes of WipeOut and Ridge Racer, Lara Croft became a sort of symbol for PlayStation sass and sex, and of course, sales success.
The timing was impeccable - with The Spice Girls burning up the charts and Buffy about to hit weekly television screens, the thirst for "girl power" was at its height, and helped catapult Lara (and anyone associated - such as Nell McAndrew) into the stratosphere of magazine covers, Lucozade sponsorship and big-budget movies.
But as Lara cemented her status as the world's first true synthetic celebrity, cracks began to appear in her very foundation, as each successive game release saw a serious decline in quality, and when 2003 saw Lara star in both the most horrific game (The Angel of Darkness) and film (The Cradle of Life) of the year, it seemed high time to put the old girl out to pasture.
One very welcome addition is that of Shenmue-esque cinematic events to get Lara through a dramatic situations.
Publisher Eidos vowed that Lara would be back, and commissioned acclaimed developer Crystal Dynamics (responsible for Soul Reaver) to rethink Tomb Raider from the ground up...which brings us to 2006 and Lara Croft Tomb Raider: Legend.
The first victim of this radical rethink was Lara's movement. Gone is the mostly-detested "grid-based" movement of earlier games (another reason I steered well clear) to be replaced by what the developer calls a Fluid Movement System. Translated, this basically means "We played Prince of Persia a lot" and it really makes an immense amount of difference, both in increasing its accessibility and lessening the frustration apparently so often engendered by Lara's clunky old style.
Lara now moves with an assured grace over all types of terrain. She's a very capable climber and can find a way to scamper up just about any monolithic obstacle that might be in her path, inching round ledges with only her fingertips carrying her weight. The way she jumps with her arms outstretched is very effective, always giving you the split-second impression she won't make it even though you know she's got it under control. The only thing they've not really cracked is her underwater movement - something few games if any have made work.
Combat has drawn concern from some quarters but it's hard to see why, as it's always fun especially considering it's one of a broad range of play styles in the game. Lara can pick up a respectable amount of weapons throughout the game, while environments are packed with opportunities for causing enemies damage by shooting out the correct strut or good old explosive barrel. I'm not wholly sure I like the fact that this is a woman that will shoot a Jaguar in the face and then make a quip about it, and in fact the animal encounters do tend to annoy, but where she's fighting mercenaries (as is mostly the case) there are no particular complaints here.
Fresh and captivating
Environmental puzzles are a major part of the Tomb Raider repertoire, and here the developer has achieved something that's rare nowadays - puzzles which feel remarkably fresh and captivating even if they are merely new takes on established conventions. And thankfully the physics in the game are just right, with objects on the whole behaving as you'd expect them to, rather than the exaggerated physics we've come to expect from many games in recent times. The addition of a grappling hook helps with puzzles as well as movement and again adds a fresh perspective to what you may have experienced before.
One very welcome addition is that of Shenmue-esque cinematic events, which require timed pressing of highlighted buttons to get Lara through a dramatic situations. These are particularly entertaining when you screw it up, as some of the resulting death animations are hilarious (swinging smack into a floodlight before crashing to the floor in a twisted heap is particularly funny).
A special mention has to go out to what's been achieved, graphically, on the old PS2. It looks absolutely stunning, far beyond what anyone would have guessed it would have been capable of - the downside of which is that the Xbox 360 version looks less spectacular in comparison.
Surprises and delights more often than we expected it to, and returns the series to that which so appealed to people ten years ago.
Legend's main problem is that it doesn't seem to know what to be. It's striving to be a massmarket IP which even your Mum will get into, to return Lara to her multimedia glory days, yet it's every inch a proper game, with like, challenges that any seasoned gamer will relish. The result is a bizarre difficulty curve, punctuated equally by moments when even the best will get completely stuck (oh so grenades don't blow up doors apart from that one?) and over-the-top hand-holding in the form of repeated on-screen help, which seems like a panicked reaction to discovering that perhaps it is too difficult for the kind of person that doesn't play many games.
At the end of the day Tomb Raider: Legend is best described as an enjoyable action-adventure romp, suffering from the odd design flaw which is just about the right side of acceptable, and punctuated by regular moments of pure brilliance. Seriously, when the game gets it right it does so with real class which matches Lady Croft's obvious good breeding.
Whether you're riding a motorcycle across high-rise rooftops, swinging from building to building Spider-Man style in a ripped cocktail dress, swan diving gracefully over the edge of a towering waterfall, or generally larking around with ancient puzzles guarding priceless treasures, Tomb Raider: Legend surprises and delights more often than we expected it to, and does a fine job of returning the series to the majestic locales, exploration and acrobatic movement which so appealed to people ten years ago.
Eidos sadly seems desperate to re-establish Lara as a valid cultural icon, not realising that (much like Buffy and The Spice Girls) her glory days are gone, and that it was this focus on those extraneous aspects of her phenomenon that was the reason the ball was dropped so badly in the past with the actual games - which to be fair is all we really care about. Forget the movies, the soft drinks, the Lad's Mags which are still stuck in the 90s, and all that other tosh - this here is a darn fine game and will place Lara back among the upper echelons of the medium simply because it deserves to.
Welcome back.
Review by: Jonny Austin
Version Tested: Xbox 360, PS2
Review Published: 06.04.06