Tomb Raider Legend E3 2005 Preshow Report

Eidos and Crystal Dynamics today released another trailer for their upcoming title Tomb Raider: Legend, showing off more of the redesigned and hopefully repentant Lara Croft. Players of recent Tomb Raider games will likely remember a string of underwhelming titles, but Crystal Dynamics seems intent on correcting the mistakes made in recent games and getting Legend right. While only hands-on impressions will reveal whether or not Crystal Dynamics is on the right track, we're going to take a look at the most recent trailer and see what new revelations it has in store for faithful Lara Croft fans.

The beginning scenes of the video feature Lara going through the acrobatic routines that she's so famous for: wall jumping, rope climbing, stick whirling, and so on. Over the last couple of years, though, series like Prince of Persia have really taken the wind out of Tomb Raider's action platforming sails. Again, we're not convinced after seeing the few seconds of acrobatics here that Legend will reclaim the crown for Tomb Raider.

Most of the latter half of the trailer focuses on Tomb Raider: Legend's action sequences, which see Lara Croft going up against numerous snowsuit-clad foes inside a cave environment. Her impressive "jump-roll-kick enemies into air and shoot them before they come back down" move is in full effect here, and we have to admit that it looks like a fun way to take down single enemies. Elsewhere in the trailer, we see Lara at a stationary machine gun position. We also see her wielding her trademark dual pistols and what appears to be a heat-seeking missile launcher.

The tagline in the trailer is "From Tomb Raider - To Hero - To Legend." It'll be interesting to see if the game actually incorporates any kind of skill progression to match this tagline. We hope to have some more details on the game soon, so keep your dual handguns trained on GameSpot. Except, you know, only metaphorically speaking.