A VERY short but sweet Tomb Raider addition.
The story begins with a young pre-teen Lara involved in a deadly plane crash and witnessing the death of her mother at the hands of an ancient mechanism. Flash forward to today and you begin to see wonderfully sculpted landscapes as Lara swings, jumps and flips her way through a mountain-side obstacle course.
While the DS version offers some surprisingly detailed graphics and beautiful 3D images, the game itself is extremely linear, sometimes your only course of action is to face forward and run down a single path, not being able to even stray from this path and explore. In high-end graphic games the player is usually able to explore even the furthest crack and crevice of a map, the level of linear story-line and the lack of moving on what appeared to be usable map space was frustrating and added to the games already short length.
The story was enjoyable and followed the story of the full PC version, minus several maps and a great deal of the difficulty in puzzle-solving. The puzzles were painfully easy and some were omitted all-together. They were essentially broken down into series of properly timed and maneuvered swings, flips and jumps in order to move onto the next section.
The dual screen feature of the Nintendo DS is brought to life when Lara approaches enemies; the player uses their stylus to target the enemies on the second screen. One of the most beautiful uses of this is when Lara swims, while the player cannot move Lara around much in water, as it’s a 2D environment under water, when she dives the second screen becomes the below-sea-level map, while the top screen remains the above-sea-level map, making an enjoyable smooth transition from screen to screen when Lara swims up and down.
Overall Tomb Raider Legend for DS is very short and it’s lack of difficult puzzles makes it’s replay value rather low, however, the cut-scenes are great, the audio is one hundred times better than it’s predecessor (Prophecy for GBA) and it’s an enjoyable little game. I’d recommend as a rental or purchased at a price-drop.