Tomb Raider: Legend
It's true what they say; the seventh time is the charm.
Published: April 6, 2006
I'm trying not to skim over the storyline, but it is really quite minimal. Yes, there are a couple of twists (that you see coming from a mile away), but the characters and the events in the game all sort of sprint up to an ending that arrives a bit too soon. Characters are killed off before they ever form enough of a personality, and the final boss fight doesn't really feel like the last battle. When the credits finally rolled, there was a sort of "...huh" feeling that washed over me. Then I started thinking back on all the levels, and realized how much fun they were.
This fun factor comes from a very obvious influence: Ubisoft's Prince of Persia series. Short of reversing time and running on walls, Lara pretty much copies the Prince's moves to a the letter. She'll shimmy along crumbling eaves and overhangs, she'll jump from pole to pole -- hell, she can even vault off an enemy and then spin around in slow motion, raining bullets down on them. But still, despite all this, it still feels like a Tomb Raider game, not a PoP clone, and that's probably because all of these elements; gunfights, flipping around, hanging from walls, it was all part of Tomb Raider before it was the core of Prince of Persia's platforming.
That's not to say there isn't some originality here. Lara's magnetic grapple is used for everything, from combat to puzzles to acquiring the little collectable secrets scattered all over the levels that unlock outfits and concept art. By throwing it at anything that flashes, she can swing out and over pits, pull objects towards her, and pluck bad guys from their perch. She also has a pair of binoculars equipped with a R.A.D. view, which makes anything interactive glow a little brighter. Looking directly at an object in the green-hued R.A.D. view for a few seconds will fill a meter, and usually Lara or her friends, who watch from a her microphone/camera, will make a comment like "you can move that." Simple, but effective.
About the only part of the game that doesn't really work is the driving sections. Twice in the game, you'll jump on a bike and basically traverse almost endlessly repetitive sections with a few enemies and a couple of random jumps made out of the terrain. Not only it is obvious that the game is just streaming the same half dozen or so bits of terrain, but the controls from the bike are absolutely horrendous. I can understand that they wanted to break up the platforming a bit, but giving Lara a bike that handles like it's driving in molasses all the time isn't the way to do it, and forcing you to navigate a bunch of jumps in a race to hit a passing train just makes it doubly frustrating.
The third time you'll come across a bike, it's actually in Tokyo, and it's used in a very short, but very, very cool rooftop to rooftop jump. This also incorporates one of the game's other "borrowed" elements: a series of quick-timed button presses a la Shenmue or Resident Evil 4. Again, they're carried over here perfectly, so they fit, but the influence is obvious. For those that hated these kind of sequences, you'll be happy to know they only show up about three times.
