Tomb Raider: Legend

I just finished Tomb Raider: Legend, and to sum the game up in a word, I'd use: "anti-climactic". Here is a game that was FINALLY wrestled from the hands of a developer who had remade the franchise literally every year without a graphics makeover, a game that could remake or rebreak the series, and in the end the story turned out to be less enticing than alot of wannabe TRs.

Story: not so good. Tried too hard, wound up wrapping itself up without any real resolution...and in a really cheesy way. There was all this build-up but no villain, characters that existed for no reason other to be background in a story that could still meander lazily into the future. It seemed too much like the new developers where trying to establish a new universe for Lara Croft, new friends, new histories, and instead of creating ones specifically for this game's storyline, just has them around in case they need to revisit them in future games. Know what I mean? Take any Bond flick, remove the villain, throw in more helpful characters, and cut off the ending. BOOM - Tomb Raider Legend.

The gameplay was arguably the best part of the game (music was strong, too), but in the end I wound up abusing the targeting system and spent most of the fights locking on, strafing, moving to the next target, locking on, strafing, and so on. There are a few options for cooler combat stuff, but it's just not as effective. To get into the middle of a fray with melee attacks or stop shooting to use the grappling hook ment getting shot - every time. The combat was more like one of those WW2 simulators with an occassional gatlin gun to use but mostly just switching between your AK and handguns.


I would have preferred to see less variety in levels and more of just a solid, hours-long dungeon exploration. Overall there are about 8 different levels, and none of them takes more than an hour or two to navigate. Tomb-wise it's disappointing - every time I got to the end of one, I'd re-realize that the original would have taken me days to figure out. This one was so straightforward that I never really had to explore the levels - there was one path to take - period. What I loved about the original game was a feeling of desperation and clausterphobia - tombs just went deeper and deeper underground, getting bigger and bigger. The level design in Legends felt more like a Crash Bandicoot-style game, pushing you down a lane with carefully-set obstacles to jump over.


Overall, blah blah blah, the game was fun to play, but there's little to replay it for. I should have waited and picked it up when it was $20, because it's value as entertainment is around that area. Chad out.