Tomb Raider: Legend Demo

The action-adventure genre has its own legends, sporting names like Lara Croft and the prince from Prince of Persia. However, Lara managed to evolve over the years and become more mature, as the series progressed and the events started to pile up. Now, she is still going on dangerous adventures to look for long-lost artifacts, but she's not that reckless anymore.

Tomb Raider: Legend recommends itself as the seventh title in the franchise and it revolves around a series of events that lead Lara into a tomb in Peru, where she finds out about the missing pieces of Excalibur, as well as a way to put them back together in order to re-forge the powerful sword. Hence, she must travel around the world and find the missing pieces, visiting a lot of dangerous places in the meantime.

Although there are some mercenaries spread through the levels, your biggest concern remain the various traps that lay waiting for you to miscalculate a jump or forget to roll on time. The platformer sections can be quite annoying as well, since the controls are not always too intuitive and the camera really does puts in the effort to make things as difficult as possible.

Another big part of the gameplay is the puzzle-solving, which involves using various objects around the environment and unlock the way further into the story. Usually, these puzzles require you to figure out how to unlock a certain mechanism, but they can also get a bit more complicated as well. Moreover, they also take advantage of the new and improved physics engine, meaning that you are going to see quite a few seesaw gimmicks.

A small portion of the game is also spent shooting at the enemies that try to stop you from reaching your objectives, although the 'lock-on' function makes matters incredible simply and there's no reason they should be too difficult. Lastly, the visual aspect has been substantially improved since the last installment, especially thanks to the new character animations and the motion capture used to render Lara's movements and acrobatics.

Tomb Raider: Legend may not shine when it comes to story quality, but the gameplay and the puzzles are about as fun as they always were, only in a much better graphic engine. Thus, the fans of the series should give the game a go, if only to see Lara in her shiny new set of clothes.