196 ответов в этой теме

[Angel-S]

Результаты тестов TRL от ведущих изданий журналов в Германии:

PC-ACTION - 90%
PLAYZONE - 90%
OXM360 - 88%
GAMESTAR - 89%
SCREENFUN - оценка 1
OPM2 - 88%

" Эти результаты подтверждают ещё раз то, что многие предвидели сначала - Tomb Raider Legend - лучшая часть серии! "

[Angel-S]

[Angel-S]

Amazon Legend REVIEW

Amazon.co.uk Review
In a nutshell:
Lara Croft is finally back in the first game to do her legacy justice since the days of the original PlayStation. With updated graphics and gameplay, and a whole new suite of moves and equipment this is the sequel fans have always demanded.

The lowdown:
After the disappointment of Angel of Darkness, the Tomb Raider series has gone back to basics with a new developer and even a new Lara. Combat is back to being only around a third of the game with everything else centred on platform jumping and puzzle solving. To help this, there’s a canny new movement system that allows Lara to jump onto and grab objects at an angle, so there’s none of the awkward grid based movement of the earlier games. This is also the first Tomb Raider to have a proper physics engine, with lots of the puzzles revolving around movement and the use of Lara’s natty new magnetic grappling hook. The graphics are also excellent, and with input from the original creator this is a long awaited return to form.

Most exciting moment:
The realisation that this is actually a proper update of the original game, as Lara leaps around cliffs like a mountain goat, with graphics and controls that aren’t still stuck in 1996.

Since you ask:
The new voice of Lara is provided by Keeley Hawes, who also plays Zoe Reynolds in BBC TV show Spooks.

The bottom line:
Lara Croft is back in the first decent new Tomb Raider game for a long time.

источник

[Angel-S]

Tomb Raider Legend coming on Nintendo DS, GBA and Gamecube!

"Tomb Raider Legend is the first version in the Tomb Raider series to be developed by the Group's Crystal Dynamics Studio in the United States. The game, which is based on a completely redesigned engine, has attracted very strong reviews and has been featured on the front covers of over 100 magazines worldwide over the past months.

"The product will be launched with a worldwide TV advertising campaign and extensive outdoor advertising. As well as being available on Playstation 2, Xbox and PC, Tomb Raider Legend will be simultaneously launched on the Microsoft Xbox 360 and, in May 2006, will be available on the Sony PSP.

"With further versions available on mobile as well as the Nintendo DS, GBA and Gamecube platforms later in the summer, this will be the first time that a Tomb Raider product has been available to customers on so many key platforms."

Остальное тут

[Angel-S]

Lara Croft Somersaults to GameCube

Превью от IGN .

[Angel-S]

psp hands on preview

Lara Croft strikes back in brand new adventure

Lara lauch pushes SCI into red

TOMB RAIDER LEGEND ON XBOX 360 DEMO

[Angel-S]

IGN reviews Tomb Raider Legend

New Xbox360 Mag. Has Legend Review!

Special edition Tomb Raider: Legend issue with exclusive review and collectible cover out Thursday April 13!

Lara’s back and she’s looking better than ever on Xbox 360. To celebrate, Issue 07 of OXM360 sports a special edition Tomb Raider: Legend cover complete with a Lara Croft who actually winks at you as you hold the mag in your hands!

And if you raid inside the magazine you’ll find our huge world exclusive review of Lara’s biggest and best adventure yet. There’s more treasure to be uncovered in the shape of £5 off the game at Dixons and a free Tomb Raider game to download to your mobile phone! It’s such a huge haul of Tomb Raider goodness that even Lara herself is reading it – check out our photos for the proof!

Alongside our Tomb Raider blowout the May issue of Xbox 360: Official Xbox Magazine previews many of the biggest games due for Microsoft’s next-generation console in 2006, including Rare’s Viva Pinata, Brothers in Arms 3, Bioshock, Rainbow Six: Vegas, Just Cause, G Fighters and X-Men 3. Xbox 360: The Official Xbox Magazine also delivers exclusive playtests of the eagerly-anticipated games, Crackdown and Too Human.

As the release schedule heats up we’ve also got reviews of acclaimed RPG, Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Far Cry Instincts: Predator, Blazing Angels and Top Spin 2.

If you just want to play games right now then our exclusive playable Game Disc has demos of Call of Duty 2 and Project Gotham Racing 3, and you can even use it to unlock our VIP Readers only section and access loads of extra content including Lara Croft sound files, a video interview with Miss Croft herself, a selection of downloadable wallpapers and lots more!

Editor of Xbox 360: Official Xbox Magazine, Stephen Brown said, “Our world exclusive Lara Croft animated cover is a real attention grabber which is sure to be huge amongst fans of the long-running game franchise and Xbox 360 enthusiasts alike. Xbox 360 and Tomb Raider: Legend are made for each other and it’s fantastic to see Lara Croft looking the best we’ve seen her in years.”

The May issue of Xbox 360: Official Xbox Magazine is on sale Thursday 13th April, with a cover price of £5.99.





Quiz Competition! Get your hands on Legend Promotional Material!

[Ares]

... Помимо этого, поддерживаются ещё и ручные сейвы...

О, то есть будет всё-таки сохранение по-человечески! Это радует.

[ACE]

Ясно. Спасибо!

[ACE]

Вер, переведешь в кратце?

TAKEN FROM Computer & Video Games .COM

With Lara Croft's triumphant rebirth as the queen of gaming heroines all but a few months away, it's with a palpable sense of fatherly pride that Eidos has been showing off its most prized set of assets. And while the story behind Lara's latest adventure is still a better guarded secret than Prince William's mobile number (apparently Lara is searching for a mysterious artefact that is somehow tied in with the death of her parents - why, we have no idea), we did get to witness several surprising new features in our latest hands-on session with the game.

Revelations such as surprising new feature number one: despite the very public effort to bring Lara back to her roots - that is, crawling around sites of significant archaeological interest while wearing a Barbie doll T-shirt and shorts combo - don't expect every level to be set in a crumbling old tomb. When she's not dodging Inca deathtraps and keeping the local leopard population under control with her trademark twin pistols, Lara can be found running around South American shanty towns and chic Tokyo cocktail parties, not to mention other, even more exotic and dangerous locales.

And that's not forgetting surprising new feature number two: that being the return of Lara's penchant for speed in the form of a souped-up motorbike with tyres the thickness of elephant legs. Needless to say, plenty of tense moments can be expected on the back of this mechanical beast.

But more importantly still, now that we've had the chance to sit down and properly, erm, grapple with the new-and-improved Lara Croft for ourselves, we can confidently state that Tomb Raider: Legend bears all the hallmarks of a classic piece of third-person action-adventure. You can forget the franchise's chequered legacy straight off - the development team certainly has, pretty much wiping the entire Tomb Raider slate clean, in favour of a completely new back-story and cast of characters, and settle down for what promises to be a good old-fashioned treasure hunt.

What's really impressed us about Lara is the way she handles in the new game (steady, gents). With much of the challenge coming from simply navigating the convoluted tombs and natural obstacles before you, getting Lara to go and do exactly what you want is vital, and Tomb Raider: Legend seems to have this down to a fine art. It sounds obvious, but getting Lara to jump from one precarious ledge to another really is as simple as tapping a button.

Likewise, getting her out of heavier scrapes (read 'gunfights with dodgy relic-smuggling types') is equally straightforward. Gunplay has always been central to the Tomb Raider ethos, but Legend has really gone to town on the experience. At its simplest, Lara can run, leap, dodge and roll about, squeezing off round after round of ammunition, but get up close to an enemy and she can vault off their shoulders, turning mid-air to target them in a stream of slow-motion bullets. Alternatively, target one of the special context-sensitive areas that litter each level and you can set off a chain-reaction of events that will ultimately cause much bad guy pain and death - shoot down a particularly shaky looking stone column, for instance, and you can crush a crowd of no-goods in deadly falling masonry.

But there's so much more to Tomb Raider: Legend than just running around and shooting. It's also a damn fine puzzler in its own right. The majority of the mental challenge in the Prince of Persia games came from figuring out how to get from one point in the environment to another. Tomb Raider: Legend has that and a whole range of devilish object-manipulation teasers as well. Using a combination of moveable items (rocks, pressure pads, pulleys and pivots, to pluck a few at random), Lara's useful new grappling hook and some very clever physics effects, Crystal Dynamics has created the ultimate combination of looks, action and problem solving. To play Tomb Raider: Legend is to be a true modern day Indiana Jones (with boobs).

In fact, Tomb Raider: Legend is about as epic as we could possibly have hoped for. With the controls, the actions and the puzzles perfectly locked down, Crystal Dynamics has been free to create a sweeping epic. The scenery is awesome, the scope huge (seriously - the levels are GIGANTIC) and the story, we're hoping, is proper rollercoaster stuff. Now does that sound like the kind of date with a 34- DD aristocratic relic hunter you'd want to miss? Thought not.

Official Xbox Magazine staff

[ACE]

Результаты тестов TRL от ведущих изданий журналов в Германии:

PC-ACTION - 90%
PLAYZONE - 90%
OXM360 - 88%
GAMESTAR - 89%
SCREENFUN - оценка 1
OPM2 - 88%

" Эти результаты подтверждают ещё раз то, что многие предвидели сначала - Tomb Raider Legend - лучшая часть серии! "

Отлично! Я же говорил, что игра будет супер!!! Малкавиане видят будущее!
Все открываем бутылки с алкоголем!

Из сканов ясно, что Датский журнал OPM поставил PS2 версии игры 84%
Графика - 18/20
Музыка и звук - 16/20
Геймплей - 50/60

Сообщение изменено: ACE (24 March 2006 - 23:19)

[ACE]

Появились оценки нового номера популярного британского индустриального издания EDGE. Максимальная оценка для данного журнала составляет 10 баллов. На этот раз редакторы были исключительно суровы:


- The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (Xbox 360, Bethesda): 8
- Tomb Raider: Legend (PS2, Eidos): 8
- Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter (Xbox 360, Ubisoft): 8
- Metroid Prime Hunters (NDS, Nintendo): 8
- Odama (GC, Nintendo): 4
- Daxter (PSP, Sony): 7
- Godfather [Der Pate] (Xbox/PS2, EA): 4
- Grandia III (PS2, Square Enix): 6
- Top Spin 2 (Xbox 360, 2K Sports): 8
- Brain Training (NDS, Nintendo): 8
- Syphon Filter Dark Mirror (PSP, Sony): 7
- Baito Hell 2000 (PSP, Sony): 6
- Tetris DS (NDS, Nintendo): 7

Инфа с GameMAG



Если вы хотите проголосовать за игру, заходите сюда, регтесь(бесплатно) и голосуйте.
http://www.ag.ru/gam...b_raider_legend

Сообщение изменено: ACE (06 April 2006 - 19:54)

[ACE]

Появился список всех оценок из нового номера EGM (Electronic Gaming Monthly) . Максимальная оценка для данного издания составляет 10 баллов. Каждую игру оценивают три рецензента и соответственно три оценки. На этот раз в список проектов попали следующие игры:


- Suikoden V (PS2, Konami): 6,5 / 6,5 / 6,5
- The Godfather: The Game (Xbox/PS2, EA): 8,0 / 8,5 / 7,5
- Driver: Parallel Lines (Xbox/PS2, Atari): 8,5 / 7,5 / 7,0
- Tomb Raider: Legend (Xbox/PS2, Eidos): 8,5 / 8,5 / 8,0
- Commandos Strike Force (Xbox/PS2, Eidos): 5,5 / 5,0 / 5,0
- NBA Ballers: Phenom (Xbox/PS2, Midway): 6,0 / 6,5 / 7,5
- Major League Baseball 2K6 (Xbox/PS2/GC, 2K Sports): 7,0 / 6,5 / 7,5
- Warpath (Xbox, Groove Games): 4,0 / 5,5 / 5,0
- Daxter (PSP, Sony): 7,5 / 7,5 / 7,0
- Me and My Katamari (PSP, Namco): 7,0 / 5,5 / 7,0
- Capcom Classics Collection Remixed (PSP, Capcom): 8,5 / 8,5 / 9,0
- Syphon Filter: Dark Mirror (PSP, Sony): 7,0 / 7,0 / 6,0
- Splinter Cells Essentials (PSP, Ubisoft): 2,0 / 7,0 / 6,0
- Tetris DS (NDS, Nintendo): 7,5 / 7,0 / 9,0
- Tao`s Adventure: Curse of the Demon Seal (NDS, Konami): 4,0 / 5,0 / 4,0
- Metroid Prime Hunters (NDS, Nintendo): 7,5 / 8,0 / 7,5

Инфа с GameMAG

[ACE]

Рецензия сайта TotalPlayStation:

Tomb Raider: Legend
It's true what they say; the fifth time is the charm.

The first Tomb Raider game was, in no uncertain terms, groundbreaking. It wasn't just that it was a fully 3D action game with huge levels and great atmosphere, there was the whole Lara aspect -- or rather Lara's aspects. She transformed Eidos from a publisher with a funny name (that hardly anyone outside the games industry knows how to pronounce, apparently) into a publishing powerhouse, and in the late 90's Lara was synonymous with video games.

Then came the sequels; the first was great, widening the experience the first offered, but as the games went along, they didn't really change, and when they finally did with The Angel of Darkness, everything broke.

In the wake of the post-Angel fallout, Eidos had to resort to desperate measures. They either pulled the Tomb Raider franchise out from Core Design, the developers that created the series, or Core voluntarily let it go depending on who you talk to, and handed it to the best development house they had: Crystal Dynamics.

The house that Legacy of Kain built stripped Lara bare, they scrapped the horrid movement system, rounded out the curves on both the iconic action heroine and the world she inhabited and went to work borrowing from the best games of the past few years while thickening up Lara's backstory, remolded her personality and gave everything a fresh coat of paint, presenting the game with a heavily modified Legacy of Kain: Defiance engine.

But did the makeover work? Yes. God yes, Legend is awesome -- by far the best game the series has ever seen, both from a visual and gameplay standpoint. It's as if Crystal D looked at the previous games as the wrong way to do things and tried as hard as they could be the anti-Core when it game to developing the levels. Legend revels in being as lush and organic as possible, with levels that look hewn from putty rather than a bunch of obvious squares.

It's not just attention to detail in the levels, but in Lara herself, or rather her movements. In nearly every instance where shimmying or wall walking or climbing would become tedious, the developers give you the option to tap the Triangle button to speed things up. So long as you can keep pressing in time, she'll keep moving quickly, and it almost transforms what was once a mundane chore into a mini-game.

Crystal D went to great lengths to imbue the character with, well, character. Her movements are almost entirely new (though you can hold down X when climbing onto a ledge for a familiar -- but smoother -- version of her more... acrobatic climb, and of course the swan dive remains intact, just tap Circle right after jumping), and there's a grace in them that wasn't really there before.

Perhaps that's just a byproduct of the focus on exploring Lara as "real" girl. Legend gifts her with a back story, which in turn fuels the rest of the plot revolving around the King Arthur monomyth -- the recurring Sword in the Stone tale that is apparently echoed across cultures -- the disappearance of her mother, an childhood friend thought left for dead and the legendary sword Excalibur itself tying the whole mess together. Though the story itself is fairly trite and a bit clichéd, it's helped by a solid chunk of enjoyable dialogue, and Lara, finally, has a motivation for tomb raiding.

I'm trying not to skim over the storyline, but it is really quite minimal. Yes, there are a couple of twists (that you see coming from a mile away), but the characters and the events in the game all sort of sprint up to an ending that arrives a bit too soon. Characters are killed off before they ever form enough of a personality, and the final boss fight doesn't really feel like the last battle. When the credits finally rolled, there was a sort of "...huh" feeling that washed over me. Then I started thinking back on all the levels, and realized how much fun they were.

This fun factor comes from a very obvious influence: Ubisoft's Prince of Persia series. Short of reversing time and running on walls, Lara pretty much copies the Prince's moves to a the letter. She'll shimmy along crumbling eaves and overhangs, she'll jump from pole to pole -- hell, she can even vault off an enemy and then spin around in slow motion, raining bullets down on them. But still, despite all this, it still feels like a Tomb Raider game, not a PoP clone, and that's probably because all of these elements; gunfights, flipping around, hanging from walls, it was all part of Tomb Raider before it was the core of Prince of Persia's platforming.

That's not to say there isn't some originality here. Lara's magnetic grapple is used for everything, from combat to puzzles to acquiring the little collectable secrets scattered all over the levels that unlock outfits and concept art. By throwing it at anything that flashes, she can swing out and over pits, pull objects towards her, and pluck bad guys from their perch. She also has a pair of binoculars equipped with a R.A.D. view, which makes anything interactive glow a little brighter. Looking directly at an object in the green-hued R.A.D. view for a few seconds will fill a meter, and usually Lara or her friends, who watch from a her microphone/camera, will make a comment like "you can move that." Simple, but effective.

About the only part of the game that doesn't really work is the driving sections. Twice in the game, you'll jump on a bike and basically traverse almost endlessly repetitive sections with a few enemies and a couple of random jumps made out of the terrain. Not only it is obvious that the game is just streaming the same half dozen or so bits of terrain, but the controls from the bike are absolutely horrendous. I can understand that they wanted to break up the platforming a bit, but giving Lara a bike that handles like it's driving in molasses all the time isn't the way to do it, and forcing you to navigate a bunch of jumps in a race to hit a passing train just makes it doubly frustrating.

The third time you'll come across a bike, it's actually in Tokyo, and it's used in a very short, but very, very cool rooftop to rooftop jump. This also incorporates one of the game's other "borrowed" elements: a series of quick-timed button presses a la Shenmue or Resident Evil 4. Again, they're carried over here perfectly, so they fit, but the influence is obvious. For those that hated these kind of sequences, you'll be happy to know they only show up about three times.


By far, though, the biggest areas of improvement are in the art and sound design. This is a gorgeous game -- not just a gorgeous Tomb Raider game, but one of the best looking games the PS2 has ever seen. Sure, having the option for both widescreen and progressive scan is certainly a nice touch (you're even asked if you want to turn either on before you start the first level), but it's really the views the developers crafted that impress; the first time you witness the massive, screen-filling waterfall in Bolivia with a faint rainbow arcing overhead, it's breathtaking.

Little touches are everywhere: when you dive into the water, the splashes are particle-based, lights in dank caves throw out wobbling mixtures of yellowish light and soft shadows that splay off everything -- including Lara, terrain everywhere is rounded and undulates softly rather than being a flat plane, there's even a bluish-white curl of smoke of the tips of the weapons after firing off a couple shots in the precision targeting mode.

Nowhere, though, is the attention to detail as great as in the animation. It's not just the way Lara moves, but the way her body reacts to things. In one sequence, you forced to ride atop a coffin and use the grapple to pull the coffin against the current. As you do this, inverse kinematics let Lara's lower half move with the bobbing of the coffin while the top part of her leans into each tug and rears back. Jump at an odd angle onto a pole to start a swing and her body will actually contort, her lower half twisting with the sideways momentum. It's such a subtle thing, but it looks amazing.

The audio, too is quite impressive. The score mixes the usual heavy jungle percussion, throws in a couple of brassy, noisy flourishes and generally just sort of sounds like you would expect a Tomb Raider game to sound. For once, though, the soundtrack wasn't what grabbed me (though a couple of the songs during the end credits, which I'm sure played during the game but I was too involved to notice, were really, really good, and were a proper fit for the rolling credits), it was actually a combination of the voice acting and the sound effects.

Again, from the effects you get the usual sounds like punchy machine gun or pistol fire, the crackle of fire, but it's the smaller things like the light, fleshy skin-on-stone claps, the constant ambient dripping or falling sand or wind howl that thickens up the atmosphere so nicely. They even managed to pull a nice audio trick during a party scene in Tokyo, where if you duck into a side hallway and start walking down it, the treble drops out of the party music and all you hear is a muffled bassline.

Because the cast is so much more of an ensemble -- at least in terms of commentary -- it's nice to know Eidos picked up some solid voice acting. Casting Keeley Hawes as Lara was a great choice, and some of the lines (particularly towards the end of the game) have the kind of edge and visceral quality that actually sells the whole performance up until then.

I haven't had this much fun with a Tomb Raider game since... well, ever. Crystal Dynamics did the impossible; they not only resurrected the franchise, but updated it so that it actually feels like a modern action game rather than a catch-up effort. Great controls (except for those stupid motorcycle parts), amazing graphics, a solid storyline and wonderful vocal performances add up to not only a reinvigoration of the series, but the best Tomb Raider game yet, and a worthy purchase for everyone, not just the fans of the series hoping for a real sequel.

Общая оценка 9.0

Графика - 9.5
Звук - 10
Управление - 8.5
Геймплей - 9.0

Мне понравился этот момент в конце:

Я никогда не получал столько удовольствия от Томб Райдера с тех пор как...э..ну никогда. Crystal Dynamics сделали невозможное - они не только возродили франчайз, но и обновили его так, что он воспринимается как новая игра в жанре экшен, а не как просто добавка к оригинальной игре.

(Немного не точно вышло.)

[ACE]

EDGE игре 8 поставил, а он - самый строгий журнал. Самое главное, что даже томбрайдер ненавистники балдеют от игры - стоит зайти на любой другой игровой форум.

СРОЧНО!!! Не думал, что AG так расщедриться! Читаем только что появившуюся рецензию!
http://www.ag.ru/rev...b_raider_legend

[ACE]

То, что игра очень понравилась даже нефанам Лары, говорит о многом.
А насчет "Еврогеймера" - не обращай внимание, тебе же игра понравилась - и это главное.

[ACE]

не обращай внимание, тебе же игра понравилась - и это главное.

Это верно !
По поводу статеички на AG. Она тоже не без язвительных подколок. В сущности, те похвальбы, которые в сием отзыве имеются, призваны стать некоторой анестезией для играющей публики, однако статья написана в язвительном тоне .

Я не заметил - вроде без язвительного тона написали.
Смысл в оценке. 85%, Они даже TES 4 Oblivion поставили 79%(ужас да? Обливиону 79%!!!). Так что им все очень понравилось.

[ACE]

У меня постоянно включен форум AG - из всех юзеров только одному не понравилась. Тоже самое и на ГеймМАГе. Загляните на оценку юзеров(идет сразу же после рецензии AG) - пока 84%.

[rhyn]

Короче говоря, летом Легенду выпустят еще на следующих игровых платформах: Nintendo DS, GBA и Gamecube.

Про стотовый телефон разве что забыли

[rhyn]

Заканчиваем оффтоп, пожалуйста.

[veresk]

Превью для PC-версии от Gamespot здесь

спасибо ACE за наводку

Бросается в глаза схожесть между ПК- и Xbox 360 версиями, поскольку складывается впечатление, что ПК-версия портировалась с консоли. Основное меню кажется более приспособленным для геймпада, чем для мыши и клавиатуры, но по крайней мере управление в игре осуществляется с помощью мыши и клавиатуры, как в большинстве экшнов от 3-его лица,и не требует много времени, чтобы приспособиться. Единственное, что может вызывать нарекания – это работа камеры в некоторых моментах, но и к этому привыкаешь, немного попрактиковавшись.
Лара будет сражаться и с людьми, и с животными. Например, нам повстречались и вооруженные до зубов наёмники, и голодные тигры.
Бой ведется легко, автоприцел – клавиша ”G” по умолчанию. Вы можете уворачиваться от вражеских атак, чуть ли не пританцовывая, и совершать большие прыжки с целью увеличить расстояние между вами и противником, подобравшимся слишком близко. В игре есть бесчисленные аптечки, чтобы Лара могла подлечиться, а сама игра базируется на системе чекпойнтов – если вы погибнете, то вернетесь в игру с предыдущего чекпойнта. Помимо этого, поддерживаются ещё и ручные сейвы.

Режима мультиплейера нет, но зато много дополнений: костюмы, апгрейд оружия и т.п. Вы сможете исследовать Крофт Мэнор, дом Лары, который выглядит точь-в-точь как в фильмах Tomb Raider, с элегантным дворецким и техническим специалистом в стеклянном офисе. По завершении уровня открываются для изучения новые помещения в особняке.

[Larisa Ivanovna Croft]

А вот не слишком позитивный отзыв от сайта «Eurogamer»

Almost three years on from the Angel of Darkness debacle, Eidos knew it had a mammoth task on its hands to restore public confidence in a brand that had suffered the most humiliating critical backlash in years. Only Driv3r came anywhere near close in terms of a public mauling, and the indifferent commercial performance of Parallel Lines suggests that consumers aren't as forgiving as publishers might hope. What are the chances of Crystal Dynamics' debut Tomb Raider offering of turning the tide of ill will?

Advertisement
Wisely, the Californian developer has gone for the 'safety first' policy of taking the gameplay back to basics, back to the late '90s vintage when Lara's improbably proportioned torso bestrode every other magazine cover. Almost everything that made AoD a painful, hateful experience has been ditched, with much of the old-style Tomb Raider II-era globe-trotting, Tomb Raiding that so many of us loved brought back to the fore. Right from the opening section of the Bolivia level, it's immediately obvious how much homage to past glories that Legend pays, but this familiarity largely breeds warm, lasting nostalgia, rather than instant contempt.

No one should expect any kind of gameplay revolution here, though, and rightly so. Legend is full-on old-style Lara adventure, complete with its fair share of levers to pull, pressure pads to activate, traps to avoid and neuter, blocks to push and ropes to swing.

I feel stronger now
Lara in rare cosy jumper moment.
But (wait!) it's not the tired, cynical retread of the past you might expect, with the obligatory New Gadgets and Equipment™ increasing the interaction with the environment like never before. Chief of these is the Metallic Grappling Device, which not only plays its part in many of the puzzles, but also helps as a jump aid to help you swing across huge gaps, and a means of dragging enemies towards you in combat. To avoid the potential frustration of trial and error, all items you can grapple with have "visually distinct surfaces" (i.e. they look shinier than everything else), and once you've attached it, you can then drag it towards you, allowing you to yank pillars, boxes, switches and the like as a means of getting from A to B. Sometimes it's simply to provide a means to block the slicing blades of death from ripping your limbs asunder, other times to give you a means to avoid being roasted alive, or even to weigh something down. In many ways, Legend would be more aptly summed up as Tomb Raider Grapple, such is its reliance on this new gizmo, but it's definitely one of the better new additions. As a result, there's actually far less switch-pushing and pulling during your adventuring, and much more time spent wondering which cunning way you can use your grapple next.

Elsewhere, Lara's also been kitted out with binoculars and a Metroid Prime-style scanner, known as the Remote Analysis Device which allows you to scan the environment and find weak spots, or whether items can be moved or operated in some way - though most of the time it's pretty self-evident anyway. In addition, you also have access to a Silent Hill-esque chest-mounted torch (a - get this - Personal Light Source), which shows off the lovely dynamic lighting effects rather nicely, but - annoyingly - runs out of batteries if you leave it on for more than about a minute and then quickly recharges, begging the question, why not just let you switch it on and off? Why frustrate the player for no reason at all? Game designers, eh? Cuh.

Another item in your 'gear' is a stock of health packs (up to a maximum of three), which you can administer yourself (with a quick push of 'up' on the d-pad) when you're about to die. It's certainly a useful addition but in terms of New Things About Lara, that's about your lot. Sure, the game also tries its hand at new ideas in other areas, such as punctuating the general action at key points with some short 'cinematic' slo-mo action sequences where you have to press a specific button when prompted, but they're hilariously basic, more than a little bit pointless and not worth dwelling on, to be honest. Even less worthy are the game's two motorbike driving/shooting sections, which come across as a feeble attempt at variation, but merely serve to illustrate that Crystal Dynamics should stick to what it is best at.

Pixel imperfect
She'd be stuffed without that grapple.
Aside from silly novelties, though, perhaps the most significant - and welcome -change to the gameplay is that Lara has been set free from the old grid-based control system, which is both a Very Good Thing, and occasionally a Not So Good Thing, as you'll discover. Old hands will notice immediately that her movements definitely feel slicker than ever. Every acrobatic somersault, every ledge shimmy and death-defying leap can now be pulled off with an assurance and a confidence that makes the game instantly feel more responsive and more enjoyable to play. The previous pixel-perfect precision that dogged some of the older games has been replaced by a system that - more often than not - reads the player's intentions. Leaps of faith to and from ropes, for example, work the way you always wanted them to, with a certain amount of invisible 'assistance' from the computer to make sure you connect. No longer does scaling crumbling rock faces and vaulting from one wobbly ledge to another require such a testing degree of "whoops, one pixel out" trial and error, with mis-timed jumps often resulting in a one-handed grasp, where players have to quickly press the Y button to steady themselves. This all makes the game feel a whole lot easier than Tomb Raider veterans might remember. It's certainly more forgiving in many respects, although there are occasions where not having a grid system means you can't just take the required number of steps back and do a run-up like before, but we can't say we missed that approach.

The combat controls certainly make things pretty straightforward for the most part, too, with a simple system that tasks the player with little more than holding down the left trigger to lock-on and fire with the right trigger. Thanks to a combination of generous controls, infinite pistol ammo and some pretty dim enemy AI, the occasions when you're heavily outnumbered pass off without incident at every stage of the game. Enemies obligingly stand around waiting to be killed (sometimes, gasp, moving behind cover), and even the ones that wield riot shields can be dispatched with a single well-placed grenade. As a nod to the past, Legend even throws in a few Leopards (and Pitbulls) throughout the game, but even they can't be bothered to put up a good fight, and the bosses - almost without exception - are unimaginative in the extreme and incredibly easy to dispatch, and only tend to hold you up via some illogical puzzle element. That said, it's just as well the combat amounts to a tiny portion of the overall gameplay - if it was a remotely important part of the experience we'd be more bothered by how utterly useless it is, but we're prepared to be slightly more forgiving than we might be because we enjoyed the main adventuring element.

A special mention has to be made about Legend's sensible checkpointing system. Often the difference between a satisfying game and a hugely frustrating one, Legend gets it right here by stopping short of the hideously forgiving quicksave method, and keeps you wanting more by never forcing the player to redo more than a few minutes of gameplay. But with several 'second chance'-type mechanics, and an unprecedented degree of hints and prompts flashing up to remind you which button to press, most experienced players will romp through the seven main levels in no more than 11-12 hours. While this undoubtedly makes the game feel somewhat shorter than previous epics, the payback is that frustration levels are kept to a minimum as a result, entertainment levels are generally high and you might actually feel compelled to see Legend all the way to the end.

Once around the block
If you do, though, don't expect an awful lot in the replayability stakes. Fair enough, there's the Time Trial mode (which is nothing more than the same level again, against the clock), and the temptation of earning more achievement points through completing these (on the 360, at least), or via the Hard Mode. But the various other unlockables (like costumes, art, pistol upgrades, cheats and the like) are pretty underwhelming compared to, for example, games like Resident Evil 4, and at the end of it, you'll wonder exactly why you spent so much time scooping up all those hard-to-reach artefacts.

Swimming's barely featured in Legend, but it's a nice trip down memory lane when you do.
But as much as we've laboured the point at how straightforward and easy Tomb Raider Legend is, there are a few memorable moments (towards the end) where it feels like the team completely neglected to adopt the same 'always make it fun' mentality. Inconsistencies creep in. Levels suddenly seem chock full of red herrings. Control prompts fail to appear. Suddenly you'll be running around wondering what the hell you're meant to do. You'll try everything. Shoot everything. Leap off everything 29 times. Grapple everything 134 times. You'll swear 97 times. And then, almost by accident, you'll do something that works. Something you swear you tried the very first time you arrived in the room. Something so simple that you feel shame-faced with stupidity. And then the same thing happens in the next room, and then the easy-as-pie boss stumps you for the same reason. It's crushing. The fact that the exact same things happened to a colleague made us feel slightly less idiotic, but even so, it highlights the fact that there's a fine line between forgiving game design and being frustrated to death by the lack of signposting (that appears in every other instance in the entire game) and presence of numerous red herrings (which haven't appeared anywhere else). Just so you know. Maybe the game's delay was to try and make it more accessible? They so nearly got it right, too.

Assessing Tomb Raider Legend's technical merits is a bit of a cloudy issue. If you're expecting its arrival on the 360 to herald some kind of next-gen dawn for Lara, then you'll be sorely disappointed. Much like so many of the early 360 games, it's an obvious port that's essentially been given the next gen 'treatment', for what that's worth. This means that, yes, it's by far the best-looking console version, but one that bears all the hallmarks of 'last gen' game and level design, albeit with the added benefit of some nice lighting effects, and, of course, high definition resolution. There's also the issue that some levels are far better than others, so the quality actually varies quite significantly between downright bland and delightful. Some of the more traditional Tomb Raiding levels seem to work best, with lush foliage, crumbling ruins and nice water effects to admire. Even the Japan level, stood on the rooftops, works well, but then you'll be wondering what on Earth went wrong with the Russian level, with its sub-GoldenEye surroundings. With only eight levels (including the Croft mansion) in the entire game, it's strange that Crystal Dynamics couldn't pull all the stops out for what is, after all, quite a short game.

Cruddy frame
Amanda in full perv suit. She's not nearly as evil as she needs to be.
But one thing that's simply unacceptable is the sludgy frame rate that seems to follow the game like a bad smell throughout. If the game could be seen to be pushing the mighty 360 beyond its means, then you'd accept that this was a small price to pay. But although the normal mapping, intricate texturing, lighting and particle effects help make this by far the best looking Tomb Raider adventure yet, there's really nothing outstanding or amazing on view to suggest that this should cause the game's frame rate to chug so noticeably for much of the time. It's not as if the levels are exactly epic in scale or ambition. Indeed, for the most part, they're tight, intricate and focused, and there's nothing on the scale of some of the more memorable ones in the original, ten year old Tomb Raider. Not even close.

That said, Lara herself is wonderfully animated, and can now pull off some remarkable acrobatics with grace and style. Climbing, swinging and vaulting around looks incredibly slick, and there's a real sense of foot tingling momentum as you pull off the more improbable feats. However, as detailed and delightful as Lara looks these days, much of the effort invested in her suite of new attacks has been wasted. For example, thanks to the ease of the gun combat, almost all of the new melee moves (slide attack, power kick, aerial attack, grapple attack) are completely redundant, as is the ability to do endless somersaults.

Also, Crystal Dynamics seems to have inherited Core Design's tendency to make all of the enemies look totally generic. So, as great as Lara looks, the baddies you're facing off against look almost identical throughout the game. Yawn. The bosses certainly look quite impressive, but their attack patterns are so limited that any sense of excitement soon dissolves. Overall, there's this lingering sense that the game has been primarily designed with the PS2 in mind, and as such the limitations that places on the game design is really transparent. 360 owners should be advised that they're only getting a shinier version - and one that doesn't even run as smoothly as it should.

Almost nearly there
Panning back to the bigger picture, there's no doubt that Tomb Raider Legend is, overall, a pretty entertaining game that long-term fans of the series will be reasonably satisfied by. The way that Crystal Dynamics has, on its debut for the franchise, managed to recapture a large chunk of what made the game such a hit in the first place is truly commendable. The adventuring, exploration, atmosphere and puzzling essence that we've been hankering after makes a stylish return, and with a control system that's - for the most part - slick and well implemented. After the shock of Angel of Darkness, getting the series anywhere close to being back on track feel like a victory.

But let's be realistic: Legend is not all that it could have been. It's justifiably irksome that the combat is so utterly lame from start to finish, and that there are some truly awful driving sections and pointless slo-mo action sequences that boggle the mind with their spellbinding rubbishness - and were it not for their fleeting appearances, the game could have easily been a disaster. There's no doubt, too, that the game could and should have been much more impressive on a technical level. In 2006, on a machine as powerful as the 360, we should absolutely not have to put up with creaking frame rates and silly clipping issues (where metal jaws can apparently go through giant fish monsters and Lara can walk on air). It's fairly obvious that Legend game wasn't designed for the 360, but even against the best action adventures of recent times (like God of War or the Prince of Persia trilogy) it falls some way short of matching the standard we've become accustomed to in recent years - both on a gameplay and on a technical level.

Tomb Raider Legend is not the stunning return to form we were hoping for, but is certainly a leap in the right direction that clings on by its finger tips to being generally solid, and mostly very entertaining addition to the series. Legend bodes well for future releases, and the Welcome mat may be out for Lara this time, but there's only so long Eidos can trade on past glories.

7/10

Вот такие вот дела .

[Larisa Ivanovna Croft]

Я не спорю, но как выяснилось такие вот отзывы, тоже имеют место быть. Придирки конечно вещь святая, однако на мой взгляд они очень уж палку перегнули со своей семёркой .

На самом деле новое творение смогут по достоинству оценить исключительно поклонники данной серии. Это на самом деле главное. Мы как никто более, жаждем новых приключений в Ларкином мире. Значит, это нам судить, насколько та или иная часть её похождений оказалась лучше или хуже. Может, конечно, любовь к игровому процессу с Ларой в главной роли, нам застит глаза, и мы не можем объективно смотреть на вещи. С другой стороны, если поклонники серии, плевались от последней части то, скорее всего, мы не безнадёжны по части объективности.

[Larisa Ivanovna Croft]

не обращай внимание, тебе же игра понравилась - и это главное.

Это верно !
По поводу статеички на AG. Она тоже не без язвительных подколок. В сущности, те похвальбы, которые в сием отзыве имеются, призваны стать некоторой анестезией для играющей публики, однако статья написана в язвительном тоне .

[NRiche]

Я всегда доверял вкусу рецензентов на AG.RU. И еще раз убедился они правы. "ИХ ВЫБОР" - "МОЙ ВЫБОР".

! ВАЖНО. Насчет управления в гонках на мотоцикле. На геймпаде быстренько (прямо во время игры) сделал mapping (дополнительное назначение) газа и тормоза на курки справа и слева - все стало очень удобно. Так что это не проблема.


Насчет язвительности AG.RU - она есть, но это скорее реверанс в сторону тех кому игра может не понравиться совсем (а такие есть ???!!!), чтобы не заклевали рецензента.

Сообщение изменено: NRiche (08 April 2006 - 01:02)