Tomb Raider: Legend Review

Behold the power of the Downloadable Demo!  I’ve heard of Tomb Raider, but what I’ve been hearing and reading about the last few games in the series has been less than flattering, and the TR film I was dragged to a few years ago hardly helped matters.  Still, I gave the PC demo a spin and was so impressed by its high-performance visuals and fluid acrobatics that I went right out and bought the game on release day.

Tomb Raider: Legend is a story-driven adventure.  The game’s plot is based on Lara Croft, a young, athletic, and very rich orphaned British noble, trying to discover the truth behind the plane crash that led to her mother’s death and almost destroyed a very young Lara, who somehow managed to hike her way to safety in hostile Nepalese mountain terrain.  What follows is a fairly personal tale about Lara’s mysterious background, with all the requisite archeological and supernatural elements one would expect.

While the story certainly figures into the game, this is a bona fide example of a by-the-numbers video game storyline.  It’s competently written and exposed, and it completely lacks cringe-worthy moments, but – in contrast with, say, the plotlines of Max Payne or Metal Gear Solid – it is really just an excuse to send Lara into beautiful, exotic locations all over the world.  A story like this could never be the backbone of a film (a good one, at least); this isn’t really so much a criticism as it is a statement of fact.

When it comes to exotic locales, however, Legend goes all out.  Lara’s destinations include sunny Bolivia and icily surreal Nepal – two sites important to her mother’s story – as well as the skyscraper rooftops of Tokyo; the ancient catacombs of Ghana and Peru; an underground Soviet base in Kazakhstan; and even a condemned Arthurian museum in Lara’s native England.  Such varied environments are a great opportunity for Ms. Croft to show exactly what she’s made of.

GAMEPLAY

Having never played a Tomb Raider game in the past, I wasn’t sure what to expect here.  That said, the game is instantly accessible to the most green action adventure gamer, so most should feel right at home here.  Ms. Croft’s activities are divided into two categories: environmental puzzle solving and mindless enemy horde shooting.  There’s also the boss battling, which is basically a combination of the two – Lara will have to do a lot of shooting to take the big guys down, but there’s usually an added trick to actually make it possible.

Taking on these one at a time, the puzzle solving is easily the game’s most organic and rewarding mechanic.  Lara is remarkably easy to control, whether you use the mouse or analog gamepad, and anything involving leaping, swinging, or grabbing ledges of any type just feels totally right.  She also has a grapple gun, which can be used for various (unfortunately, always pre-scripted) tasks.  Lara’s movements not only look smooth and easy, but the controls make her feel as lithe and acrobatic as she looks.  The Prince of Persia influence is obvious here, but if you’re going to copy someone, you might as well copy the best in the genre.  All the while, the mouse-controllable 3^rd-person camera gives a great view of the action, though it does have the unfortunate tendency to glitch out in tight corners.

Crystal Dynamics certainly didn’t skimp on Lara’s moves.  In addition to the bread-and-butter ledge-hopping, she can roll, somersault, sneak, and even swan-dive around the environments.  A lot of these moves are unnecessary, but they sure look cool, and definitely raise the player’s level of admiration for his or her in-game alter ego.

Of course, everybody knows that any tomb worth exploring is fraught with potentially deadly puzzles, and it takes much more than Lara’s aforementioned gymnastic skills to get through one.  The puzzles are variations on the same Indiana Jones themes you’ve seen a million times before – place a rock on this pressure plate here, reverse the flow of water in that pool there, etc. – but they’re still fun.  On the other hand, they’re definitely not hard, as all but a few of the game’s puzzles can be mentally solved literally in seconds.  The optional side mission involving uncovering the secrets of Lara’s stunning Croft Manor has much more challenging puzzles, and you’re bound to enjoy these; in fact, I found myself wishing that the main quest’s puzzles were a bit closer to the Manor’s in difficulty.

Beyond the puzzle-solving lies the combat system.  Unsurprisingly, Legend does a less stellar job, here.  It’s not that Lara doesn’t pack a punch or that she lacks moves.  On the contrary, her unlimited-ammo dual pistols and other weapons can take out enemies with ease (as long as she’s in range).  She can evade fire with a myriad moves, and she can even kick, grapple-gun, and melee-bullet-time her opponents, whose AI is unremarkable at best.  The problem is that the keyboard-and-mouse control scheme is too complex for its own good, the biggest issue being the necessity to switch from “explore mode” to “gun mode” in the middle of battle.  In tight quarters and in boss battles one’s combat strategy often becomes hopping like a madman and spamming all buttons simultaneously until everyone is dead (thankfully, I could map a few of the functions, like roll and grenade, to the side buttons on my mouse).  Simplicity is a virtue, and Crystal Dynamics may have been better off going with a simpler, sleeker combat interface like that in Remedy’s Max Payne series.  That’s not to say you’ll encounter much difficulty eliminating enemies, but you’ll probably mostly feel that’s the case because they suck, not because you’re all that good – not that rewarding a feeling.

Tomb Raider: Legend also contains a few motorcycle chase sequences, which are marred by repetitious landscape and camera control that refuses to properly react to mouse movement.  These are rare enough, however, not to affect one’s overall impression of the game.

All told, I had some trouble pinning down Tomb Raider: Legend’s gameplay score. Through the first half of the game and Croft Manor, it definitely felt like a 9.  But the last few levels of the game, while retaining the stunning looks and atmosphere of the first few, were fraught with annoying boss battles and shallow interactive cutscenes--instead of focusing on the game’s strengths, which are Lara’s puzzle-solving acrobatics.  (After all, both bosses and interactive cutscenes were done much better by Resident Evil 4, or, as I like to call it, “The Bid Daddy of action adventure games.”)  Overall, it feels like something between an 8 and a 9, but close to 8/10.

GRAPHICS

Tomb Raider: Legend is one of the most graphically polished, prettiest games I have seen for the PC platform yet.  This is one of those games where the visuals are so convincing that the gameplay itself feels more fun because of it.  All of the graphical techniques that Crystal Dynamics chose to implement are executed nearly flawlessly.  The star of the show is, of course, Lara Croft, and it will only take you five minutes of the first level (or the demo) to understand what I mean.  Her presentation seems as effortless as the character’s athletic skills.  She has a fairly high polygon count, expressive facial animations during regular gameplay, and 100% perfectly convincing motion-captured body animations no matter what she’s doing – and this girl can do a lot of moves.  Her animations perfectly convey the character’s agility as she vaults over huge chasms, shimmies along narrow ledges, propels herself on the grappling rope, or mercilessly perforates her enemies with automatic fire in bullet time.  Equally impressively, Lara’s appearance changes according to the environment.  The best example of this is how her skin and outfits (nearly all 30 of them) realistically get wet and/or dirty depending on what she did recently (swimming, climbing, etc.). It is somewhat odd, however, that a few of the outfits aren’t provided with wetness effects, so, for some reason, Lara looks totally dry when getting out of the water in her swimsuit.  It’s odd, but it’s no more than a quibble.

While Lara’s model, animations, and environmental effects are the most impressive aspect of the presentation, the environments are not far behind.  They are as varied as they are beautiful, and the game’s engine is equally as capable of showing off classic catacombs as well as wide-open outside areas: the urban sprawl of Tokyo, or the softly lit Croft Manor with its shimmering swimming pool and dusty library.  Water looks particularly fantastic, whether swimming underwater or on the surface.

Crystal Dynamics didn’t content themselves with all that – the screenshots don’t do this game justice.  They added a host of full-screen effects such as motion blur, depth of field, dust fog (no, not the cheap, frame rate-increasing kind), etc.  For this reason, the game looks best in motion as opposed to still shots, since motion blur works together with regular anti-aliasing to create a cinematic, jaggy-less experience.  To top this off, at slightly-above-recommended specs of a 6800GT, 1GB RAM, and Athlon 64 3400+, the game ran at a 70fps average with no slowdown, ever, in comparison to system hogs like Oblivion or F.E.A.R., which have the annoying tendency to run well most of the time but bog down in isolated instances where it’s the most noticeable, such as big fights.

The graphics aren’t entirely a bed of roses, however.  The above performance was achieved at 1280x960, with all settings set to max including anti-aliasing, except the controversial “next-generation content” option.  I do have to say, Crystal Dynamics and nVidia really screwed up with this one.  The idea is that turning on this option – which has no sub-options to control individual effects – enables effects seen in the Xbox 360 version of the game, including radiosity-like lighting, special waters effects, and HDR.  Well, with the latest nVidia beta drivers, the “next-gen content” option drops the frame rate from 70fps right down to 20fps.  This isn’t an isolated case, either – check out some forums for this game.  I’ve heard reports of people running dual SLI cards and still getting only 30-40fps.  The bottom line is, unless you have an extreme rig (we’re talking 512MB video card), this nex-gen option isn’t really an option at all.  In addition, even at the low frame rate, the game didn’t look all that good – the HDR/bloom lighting was nice, but environment shadows looked weirdly pixelated, and the whole game just looked a lot darker than it should.  Basically, I just turned the option off and contented myself with the fine looks and excellent performance I described earlier.

However, even in the non-next-gen mode, the visuals have their flaws.  Lara’s model looks great, but not as high-polygon as the fighters in the last couple of Dead or Alive games.  Much worse is the fact that enemies look identical to each other and non-descript, and they don’t feature rag-doll death animations, which makes shooting them look kind of boring aside from Lara’s aerial maneuvers.  It’s a fairly big complaint, but the fact that everything else looks so fantastic definitely makes up for it:  This is one good-looking game.  It almost makes me want to knock that Godfather graphics score of 7 I gave down to a 6, because the standards they are a-changin’.  9/10

SOUND

Legend’s sound work is a mixed bag.  On the one hand, the infrequently and non-intrusively used musical score tends to be varied and sublimely fitting to the environment and action at the time – I particularly enjoyed the female choral vocals while I climbed around the icy mountain peaks and precarious temple ledges of Nepal.  The music definitely strikes just the right notes atmospherically.  On the other hand, the voice work could definitely use improvement.  True, Lara and her supporting characters – who are primarily heard over her headset while in action – have a uniformly excellent script and equally solid acting (even if Alister the scientist guy does sound incredibly nasal, making Lara’s sarcastic retorts doubly fitting).  However, the rest of the in-game voice work is done rather poorly.  The enemies’ repetitive bantering can be forgiven, but the constant, unending, repetitive, overbearing blabbering by the game’s bosses will likely be enough to force you to use the mute button, especially if the battle isn’t going your way.  It doesn’t sound like a big drawback, but something like that can leave a sour taste in one’s mouth, especially since the last thing one gets to do in the game is fight a long boss battle. 8/10

VALUE

The game’s main quest, if undertaken with the sole purpose of finishing the game without stopping to stop smell the roses, is about 8 hours long.  The Croft Manor bonus level is a relatively tough collection of puzzles and is good for another couple of hours; it also serves as a nice counterpoint to the tomb raiding in the main quest, which is nice since the Manor can be explored at any time from the main menu.  All the levels are also peppered with reward objects, some of which can be decidedly difficult to reach, which will be a nice challenge for observant players.  Finally, the player can undertake time trials for all the levels.  All of this activity does have some rewards, the coolest of which are–what else?–extra outfits for Lara to use whenever one wants.  All told, a skilled player will be able to get every possible extra out of Tomb Raider: Legend in at most 18 hours.  To be honest, the average player will probably get bored somewhere short of the 15-hour mark after obtaining the main outfit varieties (do you really care to unlock the Orange Winter outfit if you’ve already got the blue one and the gray one?).

As you’ve probably gathered, replay value is far from the game’s strong point, even at the relatively low $40 price point.  6/10

FINAL SCORE

Put simply, Tomb Raider: Legend is a fun game with a very high level of polish but not a great deal of depth.  It’ll cast its spell on you early with its beautiful visuals and agile main character, and it’s a fantastic experience while it lasts, which isn’t nearly long enough.  That said, I wouldn’t worry about the future of the franchise, as this title puts it back on the map in force.  Eidos would be wise to devote quite a bit of cash for the sequel, because with Crystal Dynamics, it’s in good hands. 8.5/10