The Legend Continues...

So, the Tomb Raider: Legend demo was interesting. It felt weird to play a platformer again that wasn't a Mario game. I remember loving the first Tomb Raider, but I really never got into the other ones. Legend seems to be a nice revamp on the series after that awfull Angel of Darkness game. God damn that sucked.

They've improved alot of the platforming mechanics in this game, so it does seem to play alot faster. All your climbing, swinging, running, swimming etc. can be sped up by pressing a button in time with your movements, which makes everything a bit more interactive. The shooting is alright, but the enemies sort of just stand there and shoot at you. They never really take any cover or anything like that, so that could be a bit of an issue--though I never thought the shooting parts were a big part of the original anyways, since the puzzles were the best part. That hasn't changed here either. The demo has a nice push-blocks-onto-switches puzzle that actually lets you play around with the realistic physics the game sports. It's a very nice touch that I hope is implemented alot more as the game goes on.

Also, the environments are very nice to look at. No normal mapping or anything fancy like that, but all of the lighting, water, foliage, and backgrond sceneray look very nice, and definatley a step up from any of the previous games. The character models do leave something to be desired though. They're kind of...well, polygonal. Maybe the polygon count is low on them or something. But when you have games like Half-Life 2 or Oblivion , sub-par character models start to become a bigger hinderance than they probably should be.

Either way, I was impressed with it. It won't be a blow out, but it looks to be promising. Long as I don't have to kill anymore dinosaurs.

Peace,
Ramin