Review: Lara Croft Tomb Raider: Legend
I just wrote this longwinded rambling thing about LARA CROFT TOMB RAIDER LEGEND -- love that title! -- and tried to post it under the user-review section at a rival website (Gamespot). It fucked up my paragraph breaks. So F that.
It helps to have a bit of context before delving into (deep breath...) Lara Croft Tomb Raider: Legends, so let us enter the WayBack machine for a moment.
I just opened up an old issue of the now defunct Ultra Game Players magazine to remind myself how big Tomb Raider once was. It's the Holiday 1996 issue, actually. Lara Croft's on the cover, poorly rendered. She's blowing gunsmoke from her pistol and wearing a very, very ugly red thing on her head. I think it's supposed to be a "Santa Cap", for wont of a better term. It's not the only image of Lara in UGP #92, either; not including gameplay stills or advertisements, Lara's buxom figure can be spotted 9 times, posing in various uncomfortable-looking environments. I guess she's supposed to look "sexy," but mostly she just looks pained and contorted, never more so than on that cover render with that hideous Santa thing on her head.
On page 78, Lara's first game, Tomb Raider, is reviewed by the erstwhile Patrick Baggatta, who as far as I know is no longer working the game journalist racket. He fawned over it, giving a game that in retrospect was complete shit a 9.5. Mr. Baggatta felt so strongly about Tomb Raider that he awarded it The ULTRA AWARD, which looks similar to a KMFDM album cover. That is respect, right there. If the creepy KMFDM hand award and positive score were not convincing enough, Baggatta ends his review with this sentence: "Without question, one of the very best games available... Tomb Raider is a must-have for any system." I'd call that a ringing endorsement!
Mr. Baggatta lavished some serious hype on the first Tomb Raider game in this issue of Ultra Game Players, but he did something else, too. He explained to his readers how Crystal Dynamics developed such a stellar product. Here is Baggatta's hypothesis as to why Tomb Raider was such a successful game:
"What's most impressive about Tomb Raider, however, is the fact that the game engine was a sure hit from the start and a more fiscally cautious publisher might have rushed the product in an effort to cash in on the novelty factor, but this was not the case."
Hindsight, they say, is 20/20. Eidos has done almost nothing but cash in on the novelty factor of the Tomb Raider games (so they could fund the development of winners like Omikron: the Nomad Soul?), shipping a new game to Electronics Boutique every year even though consumers had no genuine use for the product.. After something like a dozen million Tomb Raider sequels, each slightly worse than the last one, a slow but inevitable decline set in. In recent years, Tomb Raider had become little more than a mildly retarded 3D adventure game-cum-stone block arrangement simulator.
This is important, though - Tomb Raider was stupid big. Ginormous sales. Time Magazine articles, Wired cover stories, underrated Angelina Jolie feature films, you name it. I think one can argue that Tomb Raider was the first game to attract mainstream press not as a children's plaything, but as a legitimate form of entertainment, however infantile the Mainstream Media portrayed it. Had the Tomb Raider series continued to take half as many risks as the first game did, who knows how many innovations the series could have introduced? By the fourth sequel or so we might have even seen Lara develop into a fully formed woman instead of a wet dream with an endlessly repartee of snarky quips, a woman with a real personality, a woman whose actions would drive a narrative directly connected to her character... you know, the way narratives have been structured since the beginning of freaking time?
Games design in general has gone in a very different direction, however, and at this point I need to accept videogame story lines as superfluous extras; if I want a story, I'll watch Gilmore Girls or something. Tomb Raider: Legend does not have any witty banter between Lorali and Rory, but the Gilmore Girls doesn't involve chasing down some kind of mystical sword before a mostly dead sister gets it... lest Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung's theories on shared subconscious and mono-mythology lead to the destruction of the Earth.
Whatever. Lara Croft Tomb Raider: Legend is not Metal Gear Solid 2. Heck, this game doesn't come close to 1up.com Username Chriservin22's Favorite Videogame Plot Ever, Mike Tyson's Punch Out!!! -- there's at least 5 different layers of complexity to that narrative.
At least Lara Croft Tomb Raider: Legend tries pretty hard to weave a thrilling yarn. It's just that the yarn spun is kind of disjointed and told in the most histrionic way possible. Luckily, Lara Croft Tomb Raider Legend works so well as an action/adventure game, the extraneous story isn't much more than a nuisance.
Although Lara Croft Tomb Raider Legend is exponentially better than the last Tomb Raider game I slogged though (Last Revelation, on Dreamcast), both games rely on the same basic mechanics:
This works so well because Crystal Dynamics wisely ripped off as many elements as they could from Ubi Soft's Prince of Persia series. But Ubi Soft borrowed fairly heavily from Tomb Raider when they designed their first good 3D Prince title, anyway, and even Tomb Raider was just a 3D "re-imagining" of the oldskool roto-scoped Prince of Persia Broderbround games for the Apple II. Everyone steals from everyone; that's art!
Crystal Dynamics wasn't just stealing Ubi Soft's stuff. In their infinite wisdom, Legend's development team looked back to Shenmue and decided to graft on some Quick Timer Events. There is no readily apparent reason for this. Compounding the initial lapse of judgement, CD screwed the whole QTE mechanic up by giving the player absolutely no warning beforehand. You're almost certainly going to die half a second after that first unexpected green triangle pops onto the screen no matter how many recent action/adventure games you've played. Even Shenmue, the gameplay of which otherwise revolved around picking stupid looking things up off the ground and looking at them (sidenote: I fucking hate Shenmue) warned you whenever some fat kid kicked a damn soccer ball at your face.
At least there are only a handful of moments where these QTE's crop up in Lara Croft Tomb Raider: Legend. Hell, it's all perplexing. I mean, if you're gonna put QTE's into your game, shouldn't you actually bother to build gameplay around the damn things?
Outside of the QTE's and the asinine, nonsensical plot, Lara Croft Tomb Raider Legend plays a solid game. Some of the middle and late levels are as awesome as a robot programed to entertain children by break dancing until the end of time, throwing fun puzzles and shootouts at you constantly while keeping cheap deaths at a minimum.
The real selling point is the genius level design. Metriod Prime and the Prince of Persia: Sands of Time are the only two other action/adventure games I can think of off the top of my head that pull off the same vast environmental scale as well as Lara Croft Tomb Raider: Legend. There is a lot tomb raiding in this game, but each tomb is fully realized and unique unto itself. Furthermore, each level begins how the first scene of Indiana Jones & the Raiders of the Lost Ark ends, with a pitched battle between archeologist and others.
The attention to detail in Lara Croft Tomb Raider: Legend is what makes this something special. Three minutes into the game, you can move Lara right up to the edge of a tremendously high peak and stare straight down into the cloudy abyss below. It is a positively vertiginous little moment, a completely unnecessary gesture from the development team, the sort of thing that gamers racing to beat the game so they can post vulgar messages on forums telling the world how much better at videogames they are might never notice. It's a sign that Crystal Dynamics cares again.
Check out Croft Manor for another sign that the people who put this game together love this franchise. Historically, the Croft Manor has been an afterthought tutorial level hybrid Tomb Raider fans barely acknowledge. Not in Legend -- Ms. Croft's mansion is a sizable environment filled with secret passageways and ingenious gymnasiums -- a huge playground that is nearly as exciting to explore as the actual campaign missions.
Patrick Baggatta was right, ten years ago -- Crystal Dynamics built a solid engine this time around, and they were given the time and the space to develop a very quality game. It's a shame it took 9 years between good Tomb Raider videogames, but que serra, serra.
It helps to have a bit of context before delving into (deep breath...) Lara Croft Tomb Raider: Legends, so let us enter the WayBack machine for a moment.
I just opened up an old issue of the now defunct Ultra Game Players magazine to remind myself how big Tomb Raider once was. It's the Holiday 1996 issue, actually. Lara Croft's on the cover, poorly rendered. She's blowing gunsmoke from her pistol and wearing a very, very ugly red thing on her head. I think it's supposed to be a "Santa Cap", for wont of a better term. It's not the only image of Lara in UGP #92, either; not including gameplay stills or advertisements, Lara's buxom figure can be spotted 9 times, posing in various uncomfortable-looking environments. I guess she's supposed to look "sexy," but mostly she just looks pained and contorted, never more so than on that cover render with that hideous Santa thing on her head.
On page 78, Lara's first game, Tomb Raider, is reviewed by the erstwhile Patrick Baggatta, who as far as I know is no longer working the game journalist racket. He fawned over it, giving a game that in retrospect was complete shit a 9.5. Mr. Baggatta felt so strongly about Tomb Raider that he awarded it The ULTRA AWARD, which looks similar to a KMFDM album cover. That is respect, right there. If the creepy KMFDM hand award and positive score were not convincing enough, Baggatta ends his review with this sentence: "Without question, one of the very best games available... Tomb Raider is a must-have for any system." I'd call that a ringing endorsement!
Mr. Baggatta lavished some serious hype on the first Tomb Raider game in this issue of Ultra Game Players, but he did something else, too. He explained to his readers how Crystal Dynamics developed such a stellar product. Here is Baggatta's hypothesis as to why Tomb Raider was such a successful game:
"What's most impressive about Tomb Raider, however, is the fact that the game engine was a sure hit from the start and a more fiscally cautious publisher might have rushed the product in an effort to cash in on the novelty factor, but this was not the case."
Hindsight, they say, is 20/20. Eidos has done almost nothing but cash in on the novelty factor of the Tomb Raider games (so they could fund the development of winners like Omikron: the Nomad Soul?), shipping a new game to Electronics Boutique every year even though consumers had no genuine use for the product.. After something like a dozen million Tomb Raider sequels, each slightly worse than the last one, a slow but inevitable decline set in. In recent years, Tomb Raider had become little more than a mildly retarded 3D adventure game-cum-stone block arrangement simulator.
This is important, though - Tomb Raider was stupid big. Ginormous sales. Time Magazine articles, Wired cover stories, underrated Angelina Jolie feature films, you name it. I think one can argue that Tomb Raider was the first game to attract mainstream press not as a children's plaything, but as a legitimate form of entertainment, however infantile the Mainstream Media portrayed it. Had the Tomb Raider series continued to take half as many risks as the first game did, who knows how many innovations the series could have introduced? By the fourth sequel or so we might have even seen Lara develop into a fully formed woman instead of a wet dream with an endlessly repartee of snarky quips, a woman with a real personality, a woman whose actions would drive a narrative directly connected to her character... you know, the way narratives have been structured since the beginning of freaking time?
Games design in general has gone in a very different direction, however, and at this point I need to accept videogame story lines as superfluous extras; if I want a story, I'll watch Gilmore Girls or something. Tomb Raider: Legend does not have any witty banter between Lorali and Rory, but the Gilmore Girls doesn't involve chasing down some kind of mystical sword before a mostly dead sister gets it... lest Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung's theories on shared subconscious and mono-mythology lead to the destruction of the Earth.
Whatever. Lara Croft Tomb Raider: Legend is not Metal Gear Solid 2. Heck, this game doesn't come close to 1up.com Username Chriservin22's Favorite Videogame Plot Ever, Mike Tyson's Punch Out!!! -- there's at least 5 different layers of complexity to that narrative.
At least Lara Croft Tomb Raider: Legend tries pretty hard to weave a thrilling yarn. It's just that the yarn spun is kind of disjointed and told in the most histrionic way possible. Luckily, Lara Croft Tomb Raider Legend works so well as an action/adventure game, the extraneous story isn't much more than a nuisance.
Although Lara Croft Tomb Raider Legend is exponentially better than the last Tomb Raider game I slogged though (Last Revelation, on Dreamcast), both games rely on the same basic mechanics:
- enter big room
- look around big room
- accidently step on a pressure plate which will be releasing spikes that instantly kill you
- reload
- enter big room looking to discover logical route to exit room
- notice logical route requires Lara to make all sorts of effing crazy jumps and backflips
- perform said jumps and backflips; enter smaller room crawling with things that want to kill Lara
- kill said things with a shooting mechanic that can't help but feel a little weak
- repeat
This works so well because Crystal Dynamics wisely ripped off as many elements as they could from Ubi Soft's Prince of Persia series. But Ubi Soft borrowed fairly heavily from Tomb Raider when they designed their first good 3D Prince title, anyway, and even Tomb Raider was just a 3D "re-imagining" of the oldskool roto-scoped Prince of Persia Broderbround games for the Apple II. Everyone steals from everyone; that's art!
Crystal Dynamics wasn't just stealing Ubi Soft's stuff. In their infinite wisdom, Legend's development team looked back to Shenmue and decided to graft on some Quick Timer Events. There is no readily apparent reason for this. Compounding the initial lapse of judgement, CD screwed the whole QTE mechanic up by giving the player absolutely no warning beforehand. You're almost certainly going to die half a second after that first unexpected green triangle pops onto the screen no matter how many recent action/adventure games you've played. Even Shenmue, the gameplay of which otherwise revolved around picking stupid looking things up off the ground and looking at them (sidenote: I fucking hate Shenmue) warned you whenever some fat kid kicked a damn soccer ball at your face.
At least there are only a handful of moments where these QTE's crop up in Lara Croft Tomb Raider: Legend. Hell, it's all perplexing. I mean, if you're gonna put QTE's into your game, shouldn't you actually bother to build gameplay around the damn things?
Outside of the QTE's and the asinine, nonsensical plot, Lara Croft Tomb Raider Legend plays a solid game. Some of the middle and late levels are as awesome as a robot programed to entertain children by break dancing until the end of time, throwing fun puzzles and shootouts at you constantly while keeping cheap deaths at a minimum.
The real selling point is the genius level design. Metriod Prime and the Prince of Persia: Sands of Time are the only two other action/adventure games I can think of off the top of my head that pull off the same vast environmental scale as well as Lara Croft Tomb Raider: Legend. There is a lot tomb raiding in this game, but each tomb is fully realized and unique unto itself. Furthermore, each level begins how the first scene of Indiana Jones & the Raiders of the Lost Ark ends, with a pitched battle between archeologist and others.
The attention to detail in Lara Croft Tomb Raider: Legend is what makes this something special. Three minutes into the game, you can move Lara right up to the edge of a tremendously high peak and stare straight down into the cloudy abyss below. It is a positively vertiginous little moment, a completely unnecessary gesture from the development team, the sort of thing that gamers racing to beat the game so they can post vulgar messages on forums telling the world how much better at videogames they are might never notice. It's a sign that Crystal Dynamics cares again.
Check out Croft Manor for another sign that the people who put this game together love this franchise. Historically, the Croft Manor has been an afterthought tutorial level hybrid Tomb Raider fans barely acknowledge. Not in Legend -- Ms. Croft's mansion is a sizable environment filled with secret passageways and ingenious gymnasiums -- a huge playground that is nearly as exciting to explore as the actual campaign missions.
Patrick Baggatta was right, ten years ago -- Crystal Dynamics built a solid engine this time around, and they were given the time and the space to develop a very quality game. It's a shame it took 9 years between good Tomb Raider videogames, but que serra, serra.