Tomb Raider: Legend
Lara's PSP debut is not the stuff of legends.
Published: July 18, 2006
Tomb Raider: Legend is an amazing game. In a single move, Crystal Dynamics overwrote the mistakes of the past couple games and took things back to the roots of the series without abandoning the newer elements that kept it from all being a rehash. Moreover, they made Lara more than just a very agile set of boobs and gave her a personality, made her worldly, made her sophisticated and, for perhaps the first time, made her seem real.
Though I'd encourage you to read up on the PS2 version of the game to get the full review of the basics, I will admit that it's damned impressive that Buzz Monkey crammed the whole of the Legend experience into the diminutive frame. There were no concessions made for level design, no puzzles stripped out, no sequences (good or bad) that didn't get compressed and tucked into the innards of the PlayStation Portable for digestion.
But that doesn't mean it was pulled off without any hitches. In fact, there are two glaring issues that all but ruin the original experience: the graphics and the controls. Let me be clear here: concept-wise, nothing is lost (and in fact, thanks to a mandate from Sony, there's actually more game in the PSP version than you'll find on any other platform, and it's actually quite good), but the execution is marred by the fact that the PSP just isn't up to the task of rendering out the levels that Crystal originally crafted with the PS2 in mind.
For starters, you'll dealing with perhaps the one artistic thing that PSP developer still haven't gotten down from an art perspective: dark environments don't work. Guess what? Legend rather enjoys light-starved tombs as a matter of practice, which is fine on consoles. On the PSP, though, it means even playing the game on maximum brightness (cranked up another notch by having it plugged in) you can't see shit in a room lit with natural light.
Even the little amount of light that streamed into the office was enough to make the game near impossible to play, and it took retreating to the bathroom and killing the lights to get past them. The problem is, there's no easy solution to this other than adopting the Sly Cooper technique of painting blacks as purples, and even that's not a sure thing -- and certainly wouldn't fit with Legend's art design.
Secondly, the controls were designed from the start to make use of that all-important second analog stick. Guess what the PSP is missing? The solution was to map the right analog stick as a toggle by holding the Square button. It works, but only in situations where you have time to take in things slowly. I hadn't realized how much the camera needed to be moved around when I played the console versions because I was constantly moving it, but on the PSP, it's a huge issue, and it's exacerbated by the fact that the game regularly throws multiple enemies at you.
An auto-target option was mapped to the L Button, but it won't swivel the camera around to lock onto enemies, meaning you have to stop, use the Square button trigger to center the camera on an enemy, then use the L button to lock on that target and proceed. All the while, you're usually being peppered by enemy fire from other angles, and after you finish off that attacker in front of you, you'll have to repeat the whole process to acquire a new target.
Then of course there's the issue of the analog nub just being painfully imprecise for things like very light adjustments. Going into precision aim mode -- and it's forced a couple times in the game to get through puzzles -- is an exercise in patience. The analog nub is analog, but the massive dead zone is so pronounced when aiming that you'll spend half your time correcting for quickly overshooting.
All of these problems come to a head when dealing with the game's painfully low framerate. Save for the Buzz Monkey-created original content (more on that in a second), everything in the game -- including the freakin' title screen chugs. It's not just an aesthetic hindrance either; the choppiness is so bad that you'll often have to press a button multiple times to get it to register, and on top of the already annoying finickiness of interaction with things on the ground, it just ends up being needlessly painful to do even a simple task.
These issues are a little less prevalent in the new content added to the PSP. In addition to the new costumes and title screen wallpaper that can be unlocked, there are a handful of single- and multi-player games (though the latter is somewhat tacked-on and Ad Hoc-only), in two flavors: Treasure Hunt and Master System. The former is concerned with tracking down a handful of randomly placed idols in one of three levels; Bolivia, Croft Manor and the Fiery Maze). There are three difficulties, and each step up adds more treasures to find in the allotted time. You can tap select to check a quick close-up view of where the treasures are hidden for a clue, but the clock keeps counting down.
The latter is a little more involved. Master System is something of a series of obstacle courses, each one getting increasingly more complex than the previous. They all start with the same basic intro, but branch off into different areas. What begins as simply racing to the exit quickly evolves into climbing columns, diving over pits, and navigating a complex series of jumps that perfectly distills the new clambering mechanics that Crystal built into the Legend engine. In some cases these can meet or exceed some of the climbing puzzles introduced in the main game, and they're a nice bonus to the story. Any hey, PSP exclusive!
Exclusives or no, this is still a cumbersome experience, and one that strips Legend of the better parts of the console experience. It's not ugly (though it's not a PSP-optimized experience by any stretch either), but it is a chunky, broken experience that unfortunately cheapens Lara's comeback. If you have no other consoles, and you have a lot of patience, the problematic analog nub and piss-poor framerate can be overcome and the core game is still there to enjoy, you're just going to have to fight through a lot of crap to enjoy it.
Though I'd encourage you to read up on the PS2 version of the game to get the full review of the basics, I will admit that it's damned impressive that Buzz Monkey crammed the whole of the Legend experience into the diminutive frame. There were no concessions made for level design, no puzzles stripped out, no sequences (good or bad) that didn't get compressed and tucked into the innards of the PlayStation Portable for digestion.
But that doesn't mean it was pulled off without any hitches. In fact, there are two glaring issues that all but ruin the original experience: the graphics and the controls. Let me be clear here: concept-wise, nothing is lost (and in fact, thanks to a mandate from Sony, there's actually more game in the PSP version than you'll find on any other platform, and it's actually quite good), but the execution is marred by the fact that the PSP just isn't up to the task of rendering out the levels that Crystal originally crafted with the PS2 in mind.
For starters, you'll dealing with perhaps the one artistic thing that PSP developer still haven't gotten down from an art perspective: dark environments don't work. Guess what? Legend rather enjoys light-starved tombs as a matter of practice, which is fine on consoles. On the PSP, though, it means even playing the game on maximum brightness (cranked up another notch by having it plugged in) you can't see shit in a room lit with natural light.
Even the little amount of light that streamed into the office was enough to make the game near impossible to play, and it took retreating to the bathroom and killing the lights to get past them. The problem is, there's no easy solution to this other than adopting the Sly Cooper technique of painting blacks as purples, and even that's not a sure thing -- and certainly wouldn't fit with Legend's art design.
Secondly, the controls were designed from the start to make use of that all-important second analog stick. Guess what the PSP is missing? The solution was to map the right analog stick as a toggle by holding the Square button. It works, but only in situations where you have time to take in things slowly. I hadn't realized how much the camera needed to be moved around when I played the console versions because I was constantly moving it, but on the PSP, it's a huge issue, and it's exacerbated by the fact that the game regularly throws multiple enemies at you.
An auto-target option was mapped to the L Button, but it won't swivel the camera around to lock onto enemies, meaning you have to stop, use the Square button trigger to center the camera on an enemy, then use the L button to lock on that target and proceed. All the while, you're usually being peppered by enemy fire from other angles, and after you finish off that attacker in front of you, you'll have to repeat the whole process to acquire a new target.
Then of course there's the issue of the analog nub just being painfully imprecise for things like very light adjustments. Going into precision aim mode -- and it's forced a couple times in the game to get through puzzles -- is an exercise in patience. The analog nub is analog, but the massive dead zone is so pronounced when aiming that you'll spend half your time correcting for quickly overshooting.
All of these problems come to a head when dealing with the game's painfully low framerate. Save for the Buzz Monkey-created original content (more on that in a second), everything in the game -- including the freakin' title screen chugs. It's not just an aesthetic hindrance either; the choppiness is so bad that you'll often have to press a button multiple times to get it to register, and on top of the already annoying finickiness of interaction with things on the ground, it just ends up being needlessly painful to do even a simple task.
These issues are a little less prevalent in the new content added to the PSP. In addition to the new costumes and title screen wallpaper that can be unlocked, there are a handful of single- and multi-player games (though the latter is somewhat tacked-on and Ad Hoc-only), in two flavors: Treasure Hunt and Master System. The former is concerned with tracking down a handful of randomly placed idols in one of three levels; Bolivia, Croft Manor and the Fiery Maze). There are three difficulties, and each step up adds more treasures to find in the allotted time. You can tap select to check a quick close-up view of where the treasures are hidden for a clue, but the clock keeps counting down.
The latter is a little more involved. Master System is something of a series of obstacle courses, each one getting increasingly more complex than the previous. They all start with the same basic intro, but branch off into different areas. What begins as simply racing to the exit quickly evolves into climbing columns, diving over pits, and navigating a complex series of jumps that perfectly distills the new clambering mechanics that Crystal built into the Legend engine. In some cases these can meet or exceed some of the climbing puzzles introduced in the main game, and they're a nice bonus to the story. Any hey, PSP exclusive!
Exclusives or no, this is still a cumbersome experience, and one that strips Legend of the better parts of the console experience. It's not ugly (though it's not a PSP-optimized experience by any stretch either), but it is a chunky, broken experience that unfortunately cheapens Lara's comeback. If you have no other consoles, and you have a lot of patience, the problematic analog nub and piss-poor framerate can be overcome and the core game is still there to enjoy, you're just going to have to fight through a lot of crap to enjoy it.
