Tomb Raider: Legend (2006)

This Tomb Raider entry is a strong reboot of the series by Crystal Dynamics, bringing Lara back to her roots with a focus on action, exploration, and puzzle-solving. The PC version delivers smooth platforming and cinematic presentation, giving the game a polished feel compared to its predecessor, The Angel of Darkness (which I really don't recommend).

The gameplay emphasizes linear progression, with fluid movement and a new grappling hook that adds verticality and dynamic traversal. While some players may miss the more open-ended exploration of earlier titles, the streamlined design keeps the experience engaging and well-paced. While it feels like a Tomb Raider title, it does not have the same level of depth of the PlayStation 1 title, it really feels much more linear and action-focused.

Combat is accessible and fast-paced, featuring improved controls and animations. Some vehicle sections, however, were criticized for awkward handling, which slightly disrupts the otherwise smooth gameplay. Visually, the game impressed for its time, with detailed environments, realistic character models, and cinematic cutscenes that enhance immersion.

A lot of people generally praised Legend for revitalizing the franchise. It earned positive reviews for returning to the series’ adventurous roots, balancing platforming, puzzles, and combat effectively. Particularly I really enjoyed playing this one though I consider it a skippable title for this series. While it may lack the open-ended freedom of older Tomb Raider games, it delivers a refined and enjoyable experience for both new and longtime fans.

The following post is a list of unimportant gripes I had with the game.

I didn't like the quick time events (does anyone?) and they were really not necessary. The relics were weird and not at all satisfying to pick up so I didn't (TRA does a much better job with the pickups). Also, this probably wasn't a problem back in the day I presume - the default mouse sensitivity was making me motion sick but when I lowered it, the bike levels were impossible to navigate because the camera just wouldn't move at all. Lara's rag-doll death animation was funny though so I didn't mind that much tbh. It's a bit buggy and there was a point in the game where I thought I was supposed to do something other than what I was trying to do right from the start and ended up dying like 20 times trying to figure out what it is I was supposed to be doing (and had to kill that poor leopard or whatever over and over and over again) when in fact I was meant to be doing what I wanted to do in the beginning but the grapple was not working for whatever reason.

Still fun tho.

Also I just love how Lara left her bestie Amanda to just decompose in the flooded ruins without trying to get her corpse out to give her a proper burial and then had the gall to be all "but we were friends how could you :(((". Like girl if you left me like that and went on your merry way, living your best colonial life, I'd team up with a tentacle monster too.

Ok, so, I know this will only really amuse me, but I found an old journel entry that sums up my thoughts on Tomb Raider Legend and the whole Lara Croft series up to that point.

Over to you 2006 Inc!

...................

Here's a little thingy whatsit about TR:L. First, some history.

I played the first Tomb Raider game bloody ages ago at a friend's house. I sat through a lot of it as I didn't get into it much. And never did do throughout the series' life

See, me and Lara... we never really got on. She was the well spoken, rich, attractive lady with the (IMO), awful control system and slow-paced puzzle-em-up adventures. I was the boy from the run-down, back streets of Feltham who'd spent the last few years on his 2D platformers of blistering speed and action on the Megadrive II and SNES. I was hyper-active.

We were never gonna get on right from the start. I have ALWAYS preferred to go in all-guns-blazing, while she much prefers to go climbing around on the walls and swinging from the ceiling to press some button or switch somewhere or to push a big rock onto something. I'd be standing around on the ground watching her dangling over some pit of spikes, tapping my foot ala Sonic, listening to her complain in that posh English accent that I'd killed all the tigers in the cave.

"What the devil are you doing down there, Inc?"

"I demand fire! I'm stacking the dead tigers so I can start a fire. What're YOU doing up THERE?"

"Oh for goodness sake. You are supposed to be standing on the button like I asked you to."

"Yeah, that got boring. Got any flares left?"

In short, I found her early adventures slow and boring. And controlling her was tedious, to put it nicely. Maybe I got bored too quick and didn't give her a chance to get going, but, I must have tried 4 different expeditions with her over the years and none ever got me excited.

We ended up saying bad things about each other and hadn't co-operated since the Dreamcast days.

Until now.

"Lo Lara"

"Good morning Inc. Nice of you to join us"

"Yessssss. Where are we going THIS time?"

"You'll see. Hurry up."

And off we went to some of the most beautiful locations I've ever played in and some pretty damn decent platforming. I think Miss Croft has been hanging out with the Prince of Persia, cause there's a lot in the game that appears in the Prince's platformers. Or did the prince take stuff off her? I think they both learnt from each other. Is the platforming as good as POP? Perhaps not, but I prefer the atmosphere in TR:L. Especially deep within the tombs.

And a DECENT CONTROL SYSTEM! The A button is Jump, instead of Run. Hooray!

Good little story too. Believable. History class would have been SO much more fun is teacher had been Miss Croft. She knows her stuff.

What's also good, is that locations weren't limited to just ancient ruins either, which is one thing that got boring in POP. Sending Lara swinging all over a sky scraper and the Himalayas (amazing backdrop) was great stuff. And apart from Lara's super human strength (she moves big crates), the game is very authentic. She moves like a human, albeit a very athletic human and falling too far WILL kill you.

It's refreshing.

pushes Lara into another lake.

Like that

So yeah. I liked the game and look forward to the next. It wasn't perfect and Lara still spent time moving boxes around too much while I sat around yawning. But it was fun overall. Lara and I are friends now. I may even go back to some of the older games to see if I've learnt some more patience.

......................

I miss that version of Lara. And I miss this version of me...

ENVIRONMENTAL PUZZLE-ADVENTURE - Join Lara Croft as she tries to solve the mystery of her mother's disappearance.

PROS:

++ Concise. Short, enjoyable adventure

++ Visuals. Graphics hold up decently well for a game made in 2006

++ Graphical upgrades. Next-gen graphical options were nice to have

++ Level variety. Diverse levels and environments

++ Interesting plot. The story was surprisingly interesting because of all the supernatural elements.

CONS:

-- Janky platforming. Platforming can be quite janky, which leads to annoying deaths.

-- Camera. Camera can be un-cooperative.

-- Frequent crashes. Crashed frequently when next-gen graphical options were turned on, which eventually led to my save getting corrupted

-- Combat. Combat is too easy and too simple.

This is the game that got me back into Tomb Raider, which I think was the case for many people. I had watched my dad play Tomb Raider 2 & 3, and I’d seen both the Angelina Jolie movies, but I hadn’t picked up a game myself since Tomb Raider 2, and I didn’t get that far through it.

Serving as a series reboot after Core Design became fatigued with the franchise, the first thing it hits you with is the bombastic nature of this adventure. The opening video is a loud, spy thriller intro with a poppy techno song, as was the style of the time. The levels are more streamlined, favoring big set piece stunts and gunplay over puzzles and exploration. The puzzles were a casualty of this new action flick bend. Gone are the puzzles of hunting around for keys, which honestly I don’t miss too much. Most puzzles are based in one room and can usually be solved by climbing. Very few involve object manipulation or pattern recognition.

The first half of the game is more combat focused, it’s not till the latter half the game slows down, a bit, and more puzzles show up. The gunplay is serviceable. The firefights weren’t engaging on any level above jump around and hold R2. There’s the odd environmental kill that does spice up the action occasionally, but it’s most just dumb fun. There’s no real change in enemy type throughout the game, maybe some more armor or new guns, they usually just throw more at you to up the challenge. Outside of boss fights, you never encounter any supernatural entities either. Compared to the older games, or Anniversary, this game seemed to go by at a breakneck pace. The main story was maybe a few hours. I think that’s partly due to the sparsity of content in levels. Where Anniversary levels were packed with puzzles, Legend levels have a shooting section, a climbing section, and a small puzzle section then you’re done.

The original Tomb Raiders had a timeless quality to their presentation. Sure, the graphics dated it to the nineties, but the music and adventures were much less a product of the times. This reboot however is very much a product of the early 2000s. During a motorcycle chase the background music is a distorted driving guitar that’s very evocative of the time. Lara’s sass has a very early 2000s twist on it and the character designs are painfully early 2000s, from the My Chemical Romance villain to the trendy sidekicks. Still, I wouldn’t consider that a knock against the game. It’s dated, but nothing has aged poorly in a “problematic” sense. It just makes the game kinda campy and takes me back to that time in my life. This game is also one of the first after the Jolie films and it only takes a few inspirations from that film. The main logo is most obvious, there’s also a few bonus outfits and Croft Manor has been redesigned with some movie influences.

Legends’ story focuses on Lara and her family legacy, a plot point that carried over to the Survivor series. I appreciate the characterization we get for Lara in the LAU series. While I didn’t play the later Core entries, the original games never developed her beyond “snarky British lady”. This time around the treasure she pursues holds a more personal connection. There’s still plenty of snark, but we also get to see her brood and be reckless. Her support team helps to show how crazy some of the stuff she does is, maybe a bit too eagerly sometimes. This game solidifies that Lara is in fact a tomb raider, not an archeologist or anthropologist. While she may have a passing interest in history, these escapades are more for the thrill. Indiana Jones she is not.

Lara’s face in the LAU series has always looked a bit off to me. I get there were graphics limitations, every character looks a little bit like melted plastic. There’s something else with her though. I think it’s just her eyes are too big. The other characters are goofy archetypes; the sniveling academic, the Alfred butler, the techy black guy. One bad guy is Lara’s old friend, presumed dead, who came back as a goth kid. Her voice actor I’ve heard in hundreds of other things, but don’t know her name. Her boyfriend, the other bad guy, is a bland American dude voiced by Rino Romano. All I could hear when he talked was The Batman.

The treasure aspect of the story involves finding the pieces of Excalibur. I always disliked their take on Excalibur’s design. I get they were trying to convey it wasn’t just a regular sword, but some ancient alien type shit, but it looks ugly. It looks like a jumble of stones in the vague shape of a sword with an edge so thick it would be more effective as a hammer than a cutting implement. I guess technically it’s more of a staff, as they do mention a magic staff occasionally, but I would’ve preferred either a traditional sword with some unique offshoots, or just something more streamlined in design. The game barely pulls from Arthurian legend. While finding him wasn't the main point of the game, when you do find his tomb there's not the amount of pomp & circumstance I would expect. There's an attempt at a meta story of how every culture has their version of Arthur, but it's not developed. None of the locations you visit are tied to anything from the lore.

You visit a wide variety of locations around the globe. Some standouts are the derelict King Arthur museum and it’s crypt in London and the jungle temple in Ghana. The level in Kazakhstan where you explore an old Soviet laboratory was a bit of a letdown. Outside a few hammer and sickles painted on the walls and lots of tesla coils, you’d be mistaken for forgetting it was supposed to be a lab from the 50s and not just a bland concrete building. The world design really let that place down compared to the fun world space of the Arthur museum. Rise of the Tomb Raider did the derelict Soviet base better.

All in all, this still remains one of my favorite Tomb Raider games, possibly my number one. The controls are more intuitive to go back to versus the older tank controls and there’s still a bit of grand adventure escapist fun in the story that kinda gets lost in the Survivor series. Some more challenging puzzles would've been nice, but the game keeps a good pace.

Tomb Raider Legend is not that legendary. Its protagonist is though! and what a comeback it was for this interpretation of Lara, by Crystal Dynamics. Story is meh, meaning, reminiscent of other Tomb Raider titles, with some fun hints and homages to past travels sprinkled in. The best part are still the puzzles and platform sections and the different environments that are beautifully designed. There's some extras, outfits and collectibles to search for during the levels, but nothing too exciting. Music and sound design is spot on and nothing to complain about, while combat gameplay is mostly for show, with auto lock-on and quick time events dominating the game.

The adventure part of 'Legend' is what makes it a memorable entry in the TR saga. It reminds me of the first game in the first trilogy, the original trilogy, in a sense that it laid the ground work for upcoming titles and introduced the series to a whole new generation of fans! Today, the biking sections and quick time event boss fights make it feel outdated and kinda cheap, but overall this is a heartfelt chapter in the story of Lara Croft, clearly made for and by fans of the series.

The final scene between Amanda and Lara is one of the most significant scenes in cinematic herstory x

This game is very nostalgic to me, but I honestly think it's peak TR adventuring with great level design, cool set-pieces and an interesting story. The game is pretty short (4hrs-ish) but I think this is maybe the 5th time I've replayed it in recent memory because it's just so fun.

Our Tomb Raider journey reached the end of the Core Design era, and now we are here.

The first Crystal Dynamics Tomb Raider game had many things to deal with, Angel of Darkness was a critical (and commercial?) failure, meaning the first real next gen game had a crash landing. The new game had to modernize the franchise and basically reinvent Lara Croft and I think it does a really gob job at that.

Let's face it, the Tomb Raider games were never heavy on story and it was never really clear what drives Lara Croft (who sometimes did very questionable things in the games...). Angel of Darkness tried to change things, but we know what happened with that. The game starts at the beginning of Lara's adventurer story, a plane crash (a backstory that was buried somewhere in the manual of the first Tomb Raider game) that changed her life and lead to her life as a globetrotting archeologist and a clear motivation behind all her travels, not some random relic but something more personal for her.

Another thing that I was really skeptical of at first: Lara has a team! She is actually working together with other people and getting advice from them, how crazy is that? I know that this represents the early 2000s trend of a "radio buddy" but it was working for me and never got annoying. A little banter and background information is something you rarely got from the close-lipped Lara from the past.

As for the gameplay, it's completely different from before. The relatively slow and methodical jumping and adjusting and readjusting and readjusting of the position is replaced with a more modern and flexible system that is gamepad friendly. The main focus is still on the climbing and puzzle solving, but of course there's still plenty of shooting to do, which in my opinion works better than ever before. Inventory management is basically gone, chancing weapons, using medipaks and a handy flashlight (rip the trusty flares) is done with shortcuts. It controls very differently compared to the old games, because it's actually designed like a modern game, something that you can like or dislike.

And now we're getting to the buts... A checkpoint system replaced the (on the PC at least) save whenever you want feature and it's not always pleasant. Something that really surprised me is how buggy this game actually still is, I never expected this since Angel of Darkness was infamous for just that. I never encountered something really game breaking, but it was really annoying to collide with invisible objects or occasionally clip through the environment. But the most annoying one for me was the "wrong outfit" bug. One thing the game does really well is the variety of the different setting and Lara dressing according to them, outfits that you can unlock and equip when exploring the manor or replaying levels. But that's the thing, you can only change outfits when replaying a level, you have to beat a level with the story relevant outfit first. But this pre-selected outfit is sometimes just wrong, not fitting for the environment (climbing a mountain in a catsuit) and often an outfit you haven't even unlocked yet.

Well that were some annoying things but something I could easily overlook unlike other elements in the game. There were two parts in the game that were easily the worst for me and really spoiled the fun. The first are the motorbike parts, there are not many in the game but boy are they annoying. You have to drive a more or less linear path while shooting at enemies that appear near you, they start to swarm you, it's hard to avoid them and the only way to heal is to pick up randomly spawning medipaks on the road. This segments really overstay their welcome and can be frustrating, because they're just so random (maybe that was because of the difficulty setting, but you can't change it without replaying the whole level).

The second big minus are the boss fights. The camera is never your friend during one of them and the enemies keep not only spamming their attacks, but their voice lines as well, come on! Not a single boss fight felt satisfying to me, there was always something annoying and clunky to them. A problem that the previous entries also had.

So to sum it up: (I didn't really want to write that much about this game what is wrong with me)

It's a good game and does a good job at rejuvenating the Franchise, I really liked the atmosphere and the music. But there's still plenty of room for improvement and I really hope the next Crystal Dyamics games work on their mistakes (and cut the motorbike parts out).

Next in line is anniversary! (and the one gameboy part I wanted to play)

For me, the standout aspect of Tomb Raider: Legend is the level design. As Lara travels around the world to collect the pieces of an ancient artifact, each chapter/level shows off a unique look and feel. You start out in Bolivia, which has this large, airy feel to it. Then you move on to the dusty badlands of Peru. After that, it's the crowded cityscape of Tokyo. Then to the lush jungles of Ghana. Then to the cold tundra in Kazakhstan. After that, the rural backdrop of Cornwall. And finally, the ethereal heights of Nepal. Each level is amazingly distinct in its presentation.

Mechanically, the game is a fairly even mix of puzzle solving and combat. The puzzles are great, and solving them do create a sense of satisfaction. Combat is okay, and the key to surviving a fight is making use of Lara's agility.

There are also multiple collectibles scattered throughout each level that encourage deep exploration and level replay. Gathering collectibles and completing time trials also results in unlocking rewards, such as concept artwork, bonus outfits, cheat codes and so on.

I was not very impressed with the story itself, but it provides a reasonable premise to have Lara traveling from one place to the next. The camera and controls also caused the occasional frustration. Lara's movement was also not as fluid as I would have liked.