Its Ok Not great
User Rating: 8 | Tomb Raider: Legend PS2
Legend is a whole new Tomb Raider, with Core Design finally dropped from development duties in favor of Crystal Dynamics. Lara herself has been remade with less emphasis on the bust and more on her brains and agility ? still got those model proportions, but she can back it up with a little class and a lot of field experience. The basic gameplay is still in tact with a lot of acrobatics, shooting, and weaving your way through deadly traps, but it's given a spit-shine with a new and vastly more capable engine. Besides the obvious graphical upgrades, the new physics system is wonderful and figures quite prominently in a number of puzzles. You no longer push objects on a restrictive grid like in most games of this ilk. Instead, they can be pulled and rotated in any direction. One early puzzle requires you to launch boxes off of a catapult, but given the physical possibilities, it seems completely natural that this would be a solution. Unfortunately, the controls while moving objects are a little fidgety as you can't slide them (strafe-style) side to side. This leads to the player having to constantly back up and reposition Lara like they were trying to parallel park. Legend isn't very long, unfortunately ? there are only about 9 levels and while they take at least half an hour to finish the first time through, that leaves you with a game that's only 5-6 hours total. Some replay value extends that with time trials to complete, treasures to find in each level, and a fair amount of unlockable features. Completing every time trial and playing through the game on Hard made the experience top out around 10-12 hours. What's there is generally fun, but I wouldn't have minded a few more tombs to raid. One consolation is the ability to access Lara's mansion, which has plenty of hidden secrets all its own and you'll have to do a lot of exploring and puzzle-solving to discover them all. Tomb Raider Legend marks a return to form for the series and it wouldn't be much of a stretch to say that it is the best in the entire series. Still, some aspects are scuffed up enough that it is quite as legendary as it could be and I'm not yet convinced that Lara is a truly compelling character. She's more appealing than before, but she has an odd choice of friends (a point that serves as crux for the story, but makes it kind of cheesy at the same time) and the game's a lot more fun when it's focusing on the history and myth than her own personal saga. Legend is recommended to people who like to adventure and explore in the vein of similar titles like the recent Prince of Persia trilogy or ICO/Shadow of the Colossus
