Tomb Raider: Legend
It's true what they say; the seventh time is the charm.
Published: April 6, 2006
The first Tomb Raider game was, in no uncertain terms, groundbreaking. It wasn't just that it was a fully 3D action game with huge levels and great atmosphere, there was the whole Lara aspect -- or rather Lara's aspects. She transformed Eidos from a publisher with a funny name (that hardly anyone outside the games industry knows how to pronounce, apparently) into a publishing powerhouse, and in the late 90's Lara was synonymous with video games.
Then came the sequels; the first was great, widening the experience the first offered, but as the games went along, they didn't really change, and when they finally did with The Angel of Darkness, everything broke.
In the wake of the post-Angel fallout, Eidos had to resort to desperate measures. They either pulled the Tomb Raider franchise out from Core Design, the developers that created the series, or Core voluntarily let it go depending on who you talk to, and handed it to the best development house they had: Crystal Dynamics.
The house that Legacy of Kain built stripped Lara bare, they scrapped the horrid movement system, rounded out the curves on both the iconic action heroine and the world she inhabited and went to work borrowing from the best games of the past few years while thickening up Lara's backstory, remolded her personality and gave everything a fresh coat of paint, presenting the game with a heavily modified Legacy of Kain: Defiance engine.
But did the makeover work? Yes. God yes, Legend is awesome -- by far the best game the series has ever seen, both from a visual and gameplay standpoint. It's as if Crystal D looked at the previous games as the wrong way to do things and tried as hard as they could be the anti-Core when it game to developing the levels. Legend revels in being as lush and organic as possible, with levels that look hewn from putty rather than a bunch of obvious squares.
It's not just attention to detail in the levels, but in Lara herself, or rather her movements. In nearly every instance where shimmying or wall walking or climbing would become tedious, the developers give you the option to tap the Triangle button to speed things up. So long as you can keep pressing in time, she'll keep moving quickly, and it almost transforms what was once a mundane chore into a mini-game.
Crystal D went to great lengths to imbue the character with, well, character. Her movements are almost entirely new (though you can hold down X when climbing onto a ledge for a familiar -- but smoother -- version of her more... acrobatic climb, and of course the swan dive remains intact, just tap Circle right after jumping), and there's a grace in them that wasn't really there before.
Perhaps that's just a byproduct of the focus on exploring Lara as "real" girl. Legend gifts her with a back story, which in turn fuels the rest of the plot revolving around the King Arthur monomyth -- the recurring Sword in the Stone tale that is apparently echoed across cultures -- the disappearance of her mother, a childhood friend thought left for dead and the legendary sword Excalibur itself tying the whole mess together. Though the story itself is fairly trite and a bit clichéd, it's helped by a solid chunk of enjoyable dialogue, and Lara, finally, has a motivation for tomb raiding.
Then came the sequels; the first was great, widening the experience the first offered, but as the games went along, they didn't really change, and when they finally did with The Angel of Darkness, everything broke.
In the wake of the post-Angel fallout, Eidos had to resort to desperate measures. They either pulled the Tomb Raider franchise out from Core Design, the developers that created the series, or Core voluntarily let it go depending on who you talk to, and handed it to the best development house they had: Crystal Dynamics.
The house that Legacy of Kain built stripped Lara bare, they scrapped the horrid movement system, rounded out the curves on both the iconic action heroine and the world she inhabited and went to work borrowing from the best games of the past few years while thickening up Lara's backstory, remolded her personality and gave everything a fresh coat of paint, presenting the game with a heavily modified Legacy of Kain: Defiance engine.
But did the makeover work? Yes. God yes, Legend is awesome -- by far the best game the series has ever seen, both from a visual and gameplay standpoint. It's as if Crystal D looked at the previous games as the wrong way to do things and tried as hard as they could be the anti-Core when it game to developing the levels. Legend revels in being as lush and organic as possible, with levels that look hewn from putty rather than a bunch of obvious squares.
It's not just attention to detail in the levels, but in Lara herself, or rather her movements. In nearly every instance where shimmying or wall walking or climbing would become tedious, the developers give you the option to tap the Triangle button to speed things up. So long as you can keep pressing in time, she'll keep moving quickly, and it almost transforms what was once a mundane chore into a mini-game.
Crystal D went to great lengths to imbue the character with, well, character. Her movements are almost entirely new (though you can hold down X when climbing onto a ledge for a familiar -- but smoother -- version of her more... acrobatic climb, and of course the swan dive remains intact, just tap Circle right after jumping), and there's a grace in them that wasn't really there before.
Perhaps that's just a byproduct of the focus on exploring Lara as "real" girl. Legend gifts her with a back story, which in turn fuels the rest of the plot revolving around the King Arthur monomyth -- the recurring Sword in the Stone tale that is apparently echoed across cultures -- the disappearance of her mother, a childhood friend thought left for dead and the legendary sword Excalibur itself tying the whole mess together. Though the story itself is fairly trite and a bit clichéd, it's helped by a solid chunk of enjoyable dialogue, and Lara, finally, has a motivation for tomb raiding.
