Thirty years after Lara Croft made her debut in the original Tomb Raider game for platforms like Sega Saturn and PlayStation, Crystal Dynamics, along with support from Flying Wild Hog, is bringing that classic adventure back in Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis. Remade from the ground up in Unreal Engine 5, with an unknown amount of AI assistance, Legacy of Atlantis retells that original story in a brand-new way, along with several new gameplay mechanics.
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Publisher Amazon Game Studios brought Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis to Summer Game Fest this year where I had the opportunity to go hands-on with an early mission, which for most people lasted approximately 30-45 minutes depending on how quickly one got through the puzzles, exploration, and battle (with a few dinosaurs). I think I saw people completing it in about 35 minutes on average, considering one aspect of the puzzle was slightly confusing but still easily solvable in the end.
Based on this demo, Legacy of Atlantis is in a good place so far, but quite a bit needs polishing and/or retooling, such as dodging, grappling, and jumping, in order for it to be solid. A lot of good is there, and a lot has been done to make this a worthy remake of the original game, but so much is off that it feels rushed, even at this stage. Perhaps it needed that delay after all.
The demo began with Lara entering Peru’s Lost Valley and trying to find a way into the Tomb of Qualopec. Of course there’s never a door for her to simply walk through; instead, in classic fashion, she needed to solve a cog puzzle. Finding the gears around and up the mountain was quite easy, as was scaling the mountain itself. Like virtually all adventure games, there are marked ledges that indicate where you need to go. It’s almost too linear and far too guided, but for an action-adventure game like Tomb Raider, it works fine.
What was particularly annoying was the grappling. The act itself does the job, but in this build, you not only had to be in the air but the camera had to be facing the grappling point as well for the grapple to activate. It made for awkward movements, sometimes even forcing me to miss the grapple if I didn’t jump and look correctly. And falling back down the river meant being set back at least another 20ish seconds.
After getting all the cogs together, doing a swan dive back into the water, and moving onto the next part of the mission, Lara came face to face with a pack of velociraptors. This time, however, the dinosaurs have been updated to reflect modern paleontological discoveries: they have feathers – something that’s been a particularly big discussion within the Jurassic Park community.
Using Lara’s iconic dual pistols, the best way to take out the raptors is to build the Focus meter and enter bullet time. You can accumulate up to three instances of bullet time, which usually last a couple of seconds. It’s more than enough time to get at least one raptor down to less than half health. From there, it’s rinse-and-repeat until all the dinosaurs have been defeated.
Based on everything I saw and played in the demo, I can see that the love for the original Tomb Raider game is there. This isn’t Anniversary 2.0 nor is it truly a standard remake. There’s more underneath the hood on this game, combining the nostalgia of the 1996 title with learnings from the recent Survivor trilogy. Because there’s grittiness, but it’s been toned down. Legacy of Atlantis is far more bright, flashy, and dare I say, arcade-y. Some work needs to be done for this game to live up to its potential, but it’s on the way there.
