Review #549: Tomb Raider Legend

 Still no tombs to be found, but at least there's a legend or two!

Oh, this Lara is pretty badass alright.

 After the spectacular failure that Angel of Darkness was, mostly due to Eidos poor planning, Core Design got the boot from their prized Tomb Raider and Crystal Dynamics was brought in. Legend would mark the beginning of their new trilogy.

 In a strange twist, Legend's continuity takes quite a few pointers from the movies. Missing parent? Check. Yesmen under her command and in continuous contact thanks to headsets? Check. Even Croft manor was modeled after its movie counterpart! I liked this somewhat new direction, and Crystal Dynamics managed to make a sort-of-interesting tale. That said, the supporting cast wasn't very interesting. Lara's henchmen were lame and the villains tried too hard, but at least Lara had a very charming personality, plenty of snark and badass one-liners.

Puzzles are simple, but entertaining.

 Gun-toting action, environmental puzzles and platforming puzzles are all here and accounted for, with a bigger emphasis on the shooting. It's a more action-based take on Tomb Raider anniversary, trading the more complex puzzles for shooting-bike segments. The game itself plays pretty much like Anniversary, but without the Rage mechanic. L1 will automatically lock-on to the nearest baddie and R1 is your trigger finger. R3 lets you aim in first person. Lara always carries her unlimited-ammo dual pistols and can carry a single alternate gun, which is usually a shotgun, automatic rifle or a SMG. She can also carry up to three medikits, but enemies drop them pretty regularly and reloading a checkpoint completely refills Lara's health. Shootouts are fun, Lara is very acrobatic and these encounters are very fast-paced.

 The platforming is, for the most part, pretty entertaining. There're a lot of exciting segments in which Lara must jump from edge to edge, on platforms, columns or use her rope to hang-on to grappling points. There're a very few segments in which the camera might get in your way, but it works pretty well most of the time. There's a single QTE segment on every stage(Except one) and they are as unnecessary as QTEs have always been, but at least they are mercifully short. The horrid 'press triangle not to fall' mechanic is here too, sometimes upon grabbing onto something Lara will lose her grip and you must press triangle not to fall. It's a dumb mechanic.

As graceful as ever.

 While environmental puzzles are fewer, smaller and simpler than in Anniversary, there're still plenty of hidden relics to find which will reward the player with unlockable costumes, of which there are even more than there were on Anniversary. It's also a shorter game, clocking under 6 hours on my first playthrough.

 While most of the game is pretty darn great, you should be warned that the game is rife with glitches and bugs. There's a very famous bug in the Sea Serpent stage which can render the boss battle unwinnable unless you reset the stage. On the first snow stage, after activating the Tesla Machine, the broken doors might become impossible to traverse, which means there's no way back up unless you've got an earlier save or restart the stage. These are but a couple, there're more, and I came across the Tesla Machine one, so everyone will probably have their progress momentarily halted on a different glitch at some point on their playthrough.

Shooting mechanics are very simple, but work well.

 I liked Legend quite a bit. The more purer third-person shooting, without the Rage mechanic, was fun and the bike stages were relatively decent, but something about the smaller puzzles didn't feel quite right in a Tomb Raider game. All the bugs and glitches are quite annoying too. All in all, Legend is pretty good, but I think Anniversary has a better mix of Puzzles, platforming and shooting which make it the superior game.
 7.5 out of 10