If the success of Shadow of the Colossus was the perfect proof-of-concept for games as award-season movie, Lara Croft Tomb Raider: Legend is a good match for a different kind of cinema. Its intro sequence leans fully into the James Bond similarities that were always there, Lara Croft as charismatic gun-toting hero and shapely silhouette merged into one. As it follows through with an iconic figure, a regular flow of witticisms, big action set pieces, some broad strokes of character and a consistent level of craft but very little challenge, it feels a lot like a more recent type of comic book movie, too.
Much of the shape of Legend falls within obvious bounds set by the circumstances of its development. Tomb Raider’s step up from PS1 to PS2 had been The Angel of Darkness, a gigantic mess which led to publisher Eidos taking the series away from its developer Core Design, put the series in a pretty sticky place, and, if you believe some people’s excuses, managed to take down the Tomb Raider movie series with it. Crystal Dynamics, previously responsible for the somewhat genre-adjacent Legacy of Kain series, took on Tomb Raider with the task of steadying the ship and pointing a new way ahead. They succeeded on the first part and to some extent on the second.
Some of that is by heading firmly backwards. Legend abandons any of the more open-ended narrative approach of The Angel of Darkness, together with its broken RPG elements and its edgy darkness. It leans on nostalgia for the original Tomb Raider, coming up with a similar progression of locations and putting Lara back in the same costume in flashbacks. You can hand around the Croft Manor, and dual-wield pistols at wild animals. Coming after The Angel of Darkness, just producing a competent and complete continuation of the early games would have been an obvious improvement, and at points it is just that. Crystal Dynamics’s next Tomb Raider game after Legend would be a complete remake of the original.
Crystal Dynamics update things too, though, if not particularly innovatively. Legend is considerably friendlier to the new player, smoothly introducing Lara’s moves and making its objectives a lot more obvious throughout. It still builds in some big scale puzzles as part of that, with bits of basis in physics, but there isn’t much opportunity to get lost. There are plentiful autosave checkpoints along the linear route. The game also adds Quick Time Events, cutscenes where you have to press buttons at prompts like an even more simplified version of Dragon’s Lair. Those are mostly a drag, but when the prompts fit the control scheme for the rest of the game they almost work.
Further help to the player is provided by having a team back at base advising Lara over the radio, Metal Gear Solid and Splinter Cell style, filling in information on the settings and story and joking as they do. That is part of the biggest loss from the original Tomb Raider, which is the sense of solitude and wonder that it often inspired. In place of that, Legend has a more talkative Lara, whose wit is not just confined to cutscenes.
Legend also has a plot which goes slightly further than an excuse to travel to exotic locations in search of mystical objects. It is not a plot which provides any amazing insights or shocks, but it considers motivations and character and themes, and does logical things with them. Reasonably well! It gives Lara lines like “Closure… isn’t that what it’s all about? Why we dig up the past?” and Keeley Hawes delivers them in a way that sounds believably like an actual person might say them. These are fairly basic things to hope for from a narrative, and would be delivered on in most passable action movies, but they were new to Tomb Raider and not exactly run-of-the-mill in games more generally.
Lara Croft Tomb Raider: Legend achieved higher first week sales than any previous Tomb Raider game. Then again, so did The Angel of Darkness. There was a large element of the increasing size of the market at play there. The success of Legend is more in creating the circumstances which have Crystal Dynamics still making Tomb Raider games today, albeit with a reboot along the way. And while I can definitely see why some fans of the original would miss the mystery, the open-endedness, and the challenge, Legend is easily the most consistently I have enjoyed playing a Tomb Raider game so far. “Legends are usually bad news”, as Solid Snake once said, but sometimes you have to consider the alternative.
Top of the charts for week ending 8 April 2006:
Top of the charts for week ending 15 April 2006:
Top of the charts for week ending 22 April 2006:
