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. A shitty render of Lara Croft's on the cover. 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 appears 9 times, always posing in various uncomfortable-looking positions and 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, of whom I know nothing about. He gave a game that in retrospect was the best futuristic supertruck driving simulator of its era a 9.5. In fact, 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 fairly normal in mid 90's game journalism, Baggatta ends his review with a heartfelt 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, although getting Tomb Raider to run on an Commodore 64 must have been rough.
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, and would have cashed in on the novelty factor of all their other 90's IP if given the opportunity. Games like Fighting Force and Deathtrap Dungeon were clearly designed as franchises; sadly for Eidos and their shareholders, neither game sold very well, perhaps due to their general blandness. Or the subpar gameplay. I'm going to blame the sexist, brain-dead print advertisements. In my opinion, wonderful, long-overdue nadir of Eidos's franchise frenzy may have been the attempt to push Omikron: the Nomad Soul as the first game in a long running series. If David Bowie's OST for Omikron couldn't save it, nothing could. (I'm going to write about that game some other day -- I'm fully aware it's not very good at all, but I still love it).
Eventually, Eidos stopped trying to develop new IP and devoted more resources to Tomb Raider's ad campaigns than towards the games themselves. Just three years after publishing an incredibly daring, different, epoch-making product, Eidos was selling new Tomb Raider games at budget prices. They couldn't understand why gamers had no genuine use for the product, and that is why they are bankrupt today. Well, I will tell you, Eidos, how you fucked this one up: after something like a dozen million Tomb Raider sequels, some slightly worse than the first one, some spectacularly so, Tomb Raider was a mildly retarded 3D adventure game-cum-stone block arrangement simulator with horrid digital control when every single system had two -- TWO -- conspicuous analog sticks. Dave Halverson probably hated it, even, and if Dave Halverson hates a game with platforming elements... wow.
This is important, though - in 1996 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 as a legitimate form of entertainment, however infantile that entertainment may have seemed to the decrepitly old. Had the Tomb Raider series continued to take half as many risks as the first game did, building innovations to the core game mechanics rather than focus-testing and bullet-pointing the thing to hell, 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... well, maybe we'd have less embarrassing games in general.
As an old school adventure gamer and JRPG fan, I still have hope in videogaming as a narrative medium. Yeah, but fucking hell: videogame story lines are superfluous drivel, especially action games. If I want a story with witty banter and strong female leads, I'll watch Gilmore Girls, because Lord knows Tomb Raider: Legend can't match up with Lorali and Rory. 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, or something -- so Tomb Raider has that in it's favor. Or not.
At least Lara Croft Tomb Raider: Legend gives a passable effort spinning a thrilling yarn. It's just that the yarn spun is kind of disjointed and told in the most histrionic way possible. Luckily, there is not one bald space marine, anywhere. The extraneous story isn't more than a nuisance anyway, because Lara Croft Tomb Raider Legend is an exceptional action/adventure title.
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 formula:
- enter big room
- look around big room
- accidently step on a pressure plate in the big room, find spikes that instantly kill you
- reload
- enter big room, step over pressure plate, look for logical route to exit
- notice logical route requires Lara to make all sorts of Christ-Jesus 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
Now, though, you can do all those formulaic things with control and precision. Crystal Dynamics wisely ripped off many elements, maybe all the elements not copyrighted, they could from Ubi Soft's Prince of Persia series. I guess Ubi Soft borrowed fairly heavily from Tomb Raider when they designed their first good 3D Prince title -- and Tomb Raider was a 3D "re-imagining" of the oldskool roto-scoped Prince of Persia Broderbround games for the Apple II. Everyone steals from everyone; that's why every FPS uses Halo controls.
Crystal Dynamics wasn't just stealing Ubi Soft's good ideas, repurposing them in a different setting. They were stealing other ideas -- sad ideas. In their infinite wisdom, they grafted on some Quick Timer Events for no readily apparent reason. Worse, they screwed the mechanic up. By giving the player absolutely no warning that a QTE is coming up, the player is almost certainly going to die half a second after that first unexpected green triangle pops onto the screen. Even Shenmue, the gameplay of which otherwise revolved around picking stupid looking things up off the ground and looking at them (sidenote: I effing hate Shenmue) warned you whenever some fat kid kicked a damn soccer ball at your face .
There are only a handful of moments where these QTE's crop up in Lara Croft Tomb Raider: Legend, making their inclusion at 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.
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. (NOTE: SINCE WRITING THIS REVIEW, I HAVE FINISHED SHADOW OF THE COLOSSUS AND HAVE STARTED ICO, AND BOTH PULL OFF VAST SCALE BETTER THAN TOMB RAIDER) There isn't a lot tomb raiding in this game, but each "tomb" is fully realized, and the different environments require different sets of skills to traverse. The pacing is fairly predictable, alternating the shooty bits with the puzzly bits, but it still works.
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 words, 10 years old now, apply today more than ever-- Crystal Dynamics built a solid engine this time around, and they were given the time and the space to develop a very quality game. That's a long time between quality Tomb Raider videogames, but at least it's been done again.
