Tomb Raider Legend Demo Impressions

[TombCrow]

IGN：http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/684/684564p1.html
GameSpot：http://www.gamespot.com/ps2/action/tombraidervii/news.html?sid=6143392

[TombCrow]

Lara steps gingerly onto the stone walkway. It looks rickety and unsafe; ancient Peruvian workmanship was somewhat lacking. Let\'s be frank, it wouldn\'t pass a Health & Safety inspection unless your Uncle Huaracina was on the council.

It collapses (of course it collapses) and an Up arrow appears on the screen. Fail to press it and Lara gives a pleasant little whimper and plummets to her deep and distant death. (We kill her a good three times before the appalled PR moves us on - those whimpers are so alluring!) Press it and she leaps to a nearby statue, and following a few more time-sensitive button presses (with equally neat death sequences), pogos to the relative safety of a broad stone courtyard...

So, Lara Croft Tomb Raider: Legend - is it an interactive movie then? We thought the interactive movie was dead after such painfully dull titles as Myst and Plumbers Don\'t Wear Ties, but last year\'s Fahrenheit proved oddly popular, despite the player\'s lack of involvement. Well, fear not. You\'ll be relieved to know that Lara hasn\'t been turned into a barely controlled pouting movie marionette; she retains all the action-adventure elements we\'re used to, from outrageous acrobatics to ranged combat to physical puzzles. She\'s even got stretching idle animations that we could watch for hours. Literally, hours.

We\'re sitting in Eidos\'s headquarters in Wimbledon, London, (decorated with lots of obscene ex-Lara leotards) being shown two levels by Greg Hounsom, senior producer on the project (and of the great LEGO Star Wars). \"Angel of Darkness was a bit of a consumer letdown,\" he admits. \"Lara hadn\'t evolved since the early days, and the ways she\'d changed weren\'t right. The animations in particular had been the same since the first game, so we decided to go \'back to basics\'.\" Lawks, Tomb Raider inspired by a 1980s Thatcherite policy? She\'ll be paying Poll Tax next.

That said, that revisionist approach has borne wholesome fruit. Anyone who saw the E3 trailer, or indeed the E3 waterfall screenshots, will have wondered if they were real, assuming them to be renders. They\'re not. \"Crystal spent nine months in pre-production,\" beams Hounsom, \"taking feedback from consumers and developing their tech and artwork.\" The first level we play is a walkthrough of that Ghanaian waterfall area, starting from the cliff face that Lara was standing on. We leap off the cliff face into the water with Lara\'s trademark swan-dive (we\'re not sure how that differs from a normal dive in terms of twists and pikes and stuff), which feels very Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and then it\'s straight into the first of the puzzles.

In front of us on a small island in front of the Niagra-style waterfalls, is an ancient apparatus sealed into position by a sunken counterweight. We run Lara to the side and she instantly demonstrates the new fluid movement system, as we clamber her up onto a small ledge and she sways, pulls herself up, drops down, and shows a full range of movement vis-a-vis a ledge. To be fair, it doesn\'t look that different from Splinter Cell or Prince of Persia, but Hounsom seems to regard it all as amazingly revolutionary, so we don\'t dare contradict him. (He\'s very serious.)

When we get Lara up to the top of this little mound, we make her leap for a rope dangling from the top of the apparatus. As Lara hangs onto it, her weight (from the new physics engine) drags the counterweight out of the top of the gate. However, that doesn\'t mean it will open, just that it could - but we can\'t get down to push it open without letting go of the counterweight. Hmm. Hounsom then points out Lara\'s new swinging abilities and with a Tarzan-like whoop, we swing her into the gate, knocking it open. As it does so, it triggers a mechanism that dams the waterfalls above, opening up a huge, ancient, vault-like complex, hidden for centuries, riddled with traps, puzzles and all that. You know the score, adventure!

Of course, Lara\'s physical abilities aren\'t limited just to climbing up and down ledges. \"One of the major themes in our design document was \'Living Lara\'; to make her believable and realistic,\" explains Hounsom. Hence the cup size reduction, we imagine. \"We developed this fluid movement system as before she manoeuvred like a tank, with no similarity to a real person. This time round we built Lara\'s animations first, then we built the environment around what she can do.\" So, there\'s a whole Olympics available for her now, with her running, jumping, sliding like Legolas and swinging. (Her horizontal bar technique is particularly fine, with her switching hands, direction and even doing proper flips over the bar.) She also swims well now, though of course she can drown like anyone else, and she even drips for a good five minutes when she gets out of the water, hair and clothes sticking to her body. Eat your heart out, sweaty NBA Live 06.

Puzzles are the key to Tomb Raider, and Crystal Dynamics hasn\'t neglected these either (though so far they\'re not as fiendishly difficult as we hoped). Apart from the introduction puzzle, we see another (fairly simple) puzzle involving finding giant weighted balls and dropping them into holes. Whilst not difficult, you can actually work these puzzles out logically (a welcome change from the random \'use everything on everything\' lateral madness provoked by the traditional adventure game).

Away from the cerebral, we\'ve been informed that the game will be 70 per cent exploration and only 30 per cent combat. Lara has some nice melee moves, like sliding into enemies and kicking them into the air whilst machine-gunning them, but most enemies die pretty easily anyway (leaving a neat ragdoll corpse). Thankfully, unlike earlier games, although the camera is automatic you do have some control over it with the Right thumbstick. If you do cop it for whatever reason, you reload to a very recent checkpoint, so there\'s no battling through enormous levels over and over. There\'s even a cool autograb move, where if Lara runs off a cliff, she\'ll automatically save herself. Well, most of the time - Hounsom indicates it isn\'t consistent, which sounds a little worrying.

So... what about the Xbox 360 version? Everything we\'ve relayed here could have come from any of the other versions, so what\'s unique to the Xbox 360? Well, we did get to play the Xbox 360 version, but amazingly Eidos didn\'t seem to have a HDTV so we couldn\'t really check its hi-def support (though it still looked gorgeous at 480p). We\'re impressed at the various additional filters used to render up the Xbox 360 version, but we\'re a little worried that Crystal Dynamics is just using the same Xbox models, with their limited poly counts (even if there\'s twice as many polys as last time) and textures to build for the Xbox 360. This isn\'t going to produce a next-generation game, just a tarted-up current-generation one.

We\'re also worried by the lack of Xbox 360-specific features. There\'s no customisation or editing, no Xbox Live play, no multiplayer of any sort and, though we are assured there will be Achievements, we couldn\'t spot any. With our amazing reactions, we did spot that Lara has a range of costumes to put on, which you can unlock by achieving certain times and targets on certain levels. We hope these are also downloadable from Marketplace, but frankly we expected more than \'Dress Up Barbie\' from the Xbox 360, and Crystal.

Lara Croft Tomb Raider: Legend deliberately harks back to the past, with its reliance on simple puzzles and the as-yet-unknown story. Whether such retrograde tendencies will find a welcome on the Xbox 360 outside of Xbox Live Arcade is questionable, but we\'re keen to find out. And we will find out, soon.

Taken from : Xbox 360 - The Official Xbox Magazine

LINK : http://www.computerandvideogames.com/front_index.php?