The latest remake of the original Tomb Raider is attempting to breathe new life into the whole franchise but is it too old school or not enough?
When it arrived in 1996, the original Tomb Raider proved to be a powerfully important game, putting its newly formed publisher Eidos Interactive on the map, helping to establish the original PlayStation as the top dog of consoles, establishing Lara Croft as a global icon, spawning a rash of sequels, and later even getting caught up in Prime Minister Tony Blair’s Cool Britannia promotion.
Games don’t come much more iconic. However, is that sufficient justification for not one but two remakes? At this year’s Gamescom, we were given an early look at part of the Greece level in Tomb Raider: Legacy Of Atlantis, the latest remake of the original Tomb Raider, after 2007’s Tomb Raider Anniversary (and that’s not to mention 2024’s Tomb Raider I-III Remastered).
Tomb Raider: Legacy Of Atlantis is still being developed by Crystal Dynamics, keeper of the Lara Croft flame since 2003, when Tomb Raider: Angel Of Darkness proved so unspeakably awful that original developer Core Design was removed from the franchise. Although, with Eidos long gone, and publisher Square Enix having divested itself of the IP, Legacy Of Atlantis will be published by Amazon Game Studios.
Given how often the original Tomb Raider has been re-released and recreated, the idea that Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis might prove a pointless exercise remains hard to shift. Impressively, perhaps even miraculously, the demo we saw at Gamescom did a decent job of overcoming our scepticism, to the extent that we actually look forward to playing it when it comes out on February 12 next year.
No one was allowed to play the game at Gamescom, but we did witness a playthrough by Crystal Dynamics, narrated by the company’s ‘experience director’ Jeff Adams. ‘In this reimagining, the team has sought to preserve what makes these places special, but to find new ways to enhance the beauty of them, and for the gameplay to surprise and delight. If you’re a returning fan, it should feel like the first play-experience, reignited for you,’ he said.
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In other words, Crystal Dynamics hasn’t gone for a massively expansionist remake, along the lines of Square Enix’s three-game remake of Final Fantasy 7, but has tried to adapt the original design for modern palettes. The level design has physically expanded, in line with modern development capabilities; some of the areas we saw in the demo were way bigger than the original’s equivalents, which were often more claustrophobic than they might have been simply due to technological limitations of the time.
The quest that Crystal Dynamics piloted us through was the familiar Damocles Trial, in the game’s Ancient Greece environment, accessible via the catacombs under St Francis’ Folly. The first obstacle Lara encounters is a swarm of bats, but this this time around they’re more plentiful, agile, and bothersome than they were in the original game. This forces Lara to pull out her pistol and shoot them, which provides an early chance to see a new addition: a crafting system that lets Lara use gathered resources to make a healing balm.
While Legacy Of Atlantis may take place in the familiar environments of the original game (albeit massively enhanced in visual terms), it derives its gameplay from Crystal Dynamics’ more recent takes on the Tomb Raider franchise, following its 2013 reboot. So this time around, Lara will have a skill tree and the ability to craft all sorts of useful stuff.
Before long she encounters a leopard and ends up cartwheeling around while dual-wielding her pistols in familiar fashion. Shots landed on the beast fill her focus meter and she is eventually able to enter focus mode and land precision shots as time slows down for a period. The leopard moves in a much more realistic manner than the original game, even briefly hiding in the environment before emerging for a sneak attack.
Lara also has new gadgets that weren’t present in the original game, most notably a scanner which lets her analyse objects in the world and decide from that how best to proceed. It’s effectively a hint system, so, for example, it’s revealed that four keys are required to open a locked door; three are already installed, but another has to be found. Adams explained that the hint system can be turned off, and that the scanner will also reveal extra lore around the game’s environments.
This time around, Lara is also equipped with a grapple, which she can use to nail extended jumps and which also, we later learned, can be used for vertical traversal. At one point, she’s able to craft a potion granting short-term damage resistance too, so there’s likely other new features in the game that haven’t been shown yet.
Once Lara makes it through to the iconic room populated by giant swords that fall from the ceiling, it becomes obvious that Crystal Dynamics hasn’t just left the old puzzles as they were, but has rethought them pretty cleverly. Rather than just having to dodge the falling swords, she was able to manually shoot them down from the ceiling, so that the hilts provided precarious footholds that she could jump onto to reach a previously inaccessible area. At that point, Crystal Dynamics demonstrated a skill she could acquire, entitled Deadeye, which steadies her aim and enabled her to shoot the furthest swords down.
Just before finding the second piece of the scion, as dictated by the storyline, she also picked up a relic, in the form of a pottery owl. According to Crystal Dynamics, this unlocks her outfit from Tomb Raider Legend. They were a bit coy about what other benefits relics would bring, but hinted that they might provide more than just cosmetics.
