After several years of writing about Tomb Raider games that are disappointing, I decided that it’s time to finally revisit mainline games from the franchise that I’ve liked. And started with Tomb Raider: Legend which I originally disliked. Oh boy.
But you know what? What if 15 years later I can enjoy Legend much more than I did when it launched? It surprised even me.
Tomb Raider: Legend was the first entry in the franchise by Crystal Dynamics. It was released 3 years after the disastrous release of The Angel of Darkness by the original team of Tomb Raider developers at Core Design, a release that sadly spelt doom for the team, who were actually closed as Core Design about a month after this game’s release. The tale of The Angel of Darkness is interesting on its own and Crystal Dynamics would actually revisit lots of the ideas from that entry in their reboot Tomb Raider games, but back in 2006 Legend was seen as a fresh start for the franchise. Completely new engine, completely new sets of rules – this was a game released after the immense critical success of Prince of Persia: Sands of Time trilogy and several months into the life of Xbox 360, a new generation of consoles.
Some of the “freshness” was absolutely necessary. While I still adore the classic Prince of Persia-like tile-based platforming of the original Tomb Raider titles, that was somewhat retained even in The Angel of Darkness, as it involved a lot of mental calculation for jump distances and a clear set of rules that would stay valid throughout the entire game, the environments in 2006 couldn’t be as blocky as they used to be in the 90s in a big budget games and the more “realistic” and detailed these landscapes would get, the harder it would be to say what angle of the ledge corresponds to what action. Thus a need for more context-sensitive actions focus was born, which has its upsides too. No longer you’d need to perfectly line up the jump, you’d need to be mostly perfect and the animation will “stick” your landing anyway, slightly correcting the jump arc. This would mean that some scenes could be faster paced as you’d be able to react and perform actions faster with lower chance of failing, leading to more fun exhilarating action moments. Lots of the rules for this were already established in titles of this kind and Crystal Dynamics were experienced themselves, thanks to their wonderful Legacy of Kain series entries. In fact, Legend was developed by the same team that worked on LoK: Defiance.
As such, unlike lots of classic Tomb Raider games, the movement in this one was far more free and, well, what people would expect from a third-person action adventure game. No tank controls, responsive controls and animations, free camera movement with some automatic correction for certain scenes to give the players a better view, combat mode was still somewhat separate but was on a button hold, not a toggle, and used the expected triggers instead of face buttons. A really fun addition was the magnetic grapple hook, which made ropes in Tomb Raider games actually fun, after what nightmare they were since their introduction in The Last Revelation, and this grapple would also help in the block pushing puzzles. Pushing the blocks was made more… “agile” I guess, but this, in fact, made some of the block pushing puzzles more frustrating in comparison to how much more linear this worked in older titles (and older LoK games too).
Yet, some of this “new approach” was unnecessary. Which lead to me disliking the game originally. For one, the levels were far far more linear than in any previous Tomb Raider game. Leading up to this one, Tomb Raider players came to expect interconnected levels with Hub areas, backtracking, lots of puzzle solving and devious secrets. Legend instead was a very streamlined linear experience, with many segments not even allowing you to go back at all and several of the main locations having a linear racing action segment. QTEs were also added, because it were the mid-00s and we didn’t know better. And the amount of action was extremely high.
Now, to defend the game’s reliance on action, and me from the past wouldn’t expect me to do this, I must say that they actually made it work pretty well. It’s not fantastic, but unlike the classic TR games, where you’d enter the combat mode and start jumping and shooting around until everything is dead, in Legend you get many nice moves to spice the combat up. Including a slow-mo move if you jump off an enemy DMC-style. The way auto-aim works, the weapons you get and the locations the combat happens in, it’s actually all pretty good. Rough around the edges, hence why later entries in this trilogy would change things up, but surprisingly good.
Oh and how fun it was to return to Lara Croft that’s actually fun after the dreadful Tomb Raider reboot trilogy. Legend feels like an adventure not just because of the cool locations, secret tombs right under the cheesy tourist museum, but because Lara as a character is having fun. She has her own demons, she’s not a complete sociopath (even though she does murder everyone who attacks her first, so there’s that), she has a character ark and a range of emotions. And she has her deeper more personal reasons to do what she’s doing. But while she’s doing it, she loves it. Death defying jumps, avoiding traps, solving puzzles, discovering long lost tombs – she’s constantly in love with it all. Even the addition of support characters that comment on things over the radio (one of whom is a surprising return from Chronicles) fits really well into this, despite the fact that usually Tomb Raider games were expected to be all about silent exploration of cool environments.
This particular revisit wasn’t without issues as well. Unfortunately, since the game hasn’t really been updated for more modern hardware and software, playing it on PC can be finicky. For one, the “next-gen” option for visuals, to keep the game on par with the Xbox 360 release, is broken even with the fan patches – some effects don’t work, all physics-based objects (like ropes or hair) are misaligned and some parts of geometry can be transparent where they shouldn’t be. Even with it off, though, there are some visual bugs. Plus, the game can crash without the fan patches. And if you don’t turn on the V-sync and you have a high refresh monitor, prepare for some insane physics and animations, including the camera speed being even more unusable than it can be otherwise. Wish there would be a remaster of the title (and this whole trilogy), but it seems that Eidos, sorry I mean, Square Enix Europe are more interested in re-releasing the tedious reboot games instead. Which is on par with the rest of their genius decisions about the franchise.
So, 15 years later, I’m surprised to say that I’ve actually enjoyed Tomb Raider: Legend. It’s still one of the weaker entries in the series as far as the core of Tomb Raider franchise is concerned, being closer to Uncharted than to what TR was always leaning towards. Apart from the wonderful Croft Manor level, I suppose, that one is genuinely fun due to its more metroidvania-ish approach. But it’s more of an exception to the flow of the game and as an action adventure starring Lara Croft, it’s quite a blast.