Tomb Raider Legacy of Atlantis [Preview]: Rebuilding a legend

The next Tomb Raider game aims to be an ambitious remake of the original adventure.

I’m not the BIGGEST Tomb Raider fanatic, but I did follow the franchise from its initial appearance onward, marveling at what the game was accomplishing in the 3D action adventure space, placing a much-needed new gaming hero at the forefront of the 90s. That first game was a good time for its time, but hasn’t necessarily aged well over the years. With Legacy of Atlantis, Amazon (which now owns the Tomb Raider, uh, legacy) is doing a sort of soft reboot of the franchise, diving into that first game with more modern sensibilities, visuals and controls. It’s not a remaster, friends, it’s a full remake. Mostly!

The Summer Game Fest demo takes place in an early section of the game, perhaps the earliest, with Lara Croft emerging through a forest in front of a temple. It’s immediately noticeable how visually different and stunning the game is compared to its predecessors. While it has the same standardized third person viewpoint, Lara looks larger on screen than in those first games, with more realistic human proportions and facial features. Even without any other creatures in direct view, everything looks and feels alive, with flowing blue water and green ferns and vines shifting in the breeze. This is what Tomb Raider should look like, at least in the rainforest.

With so much detail everywhere it’s important that Lara interacts with the environment with better, more clear animations. Those animations do still feel a bit canned, though, especially when the hero climbs structures or swings from vines. That’s perhaps how things start to break the modern and lean on the classic. Though there aren’t tank controls to the character, going too far into brand new movement territory would ultimately change the nature of the game’s puzzles and traversal. In other words, it looks completely new but feels like late 90s/early 2000s Tomb Raider. This should appease long time fans of the series, but may be a bit jarring for someone coming from other new games. For one, Lara’s jumps are still “floaty”; she gains a lot of height when leaping up in the air, landing without so much as a light thud and not having the weight of modern adventurers.

Our goal in this opening area is to activate a large device by finding the three cogs that have fallen off and been strewn around the area and attaching them to it. Two of them are fairly easy, whether in the water already (and floating them to the surface) or just off to the side. We can climb around the area, grabbing apparent branches or ledges, jumping across pits (and falling into the water because our jump animation has a specific aim trajectory), and breaking pots while we find some lore now and again. The third requires us climbing up a structure and kicking the cog until it falls down. Once again the canned animation is apparent here, as it looks like Lara has only learned how to kick in a very specific way. It’s a short demo session and we see a few of these canned moves, and even while some of these could be worked out later in development they don’t necessarily hamper the overall experience, as we get used to expecting and working with them fairly quickly.

Releasing the cogs and putting them into place opens our path and we move on, eventually coming across some very angry (or hungry?) raptors. This is where we can finally put to use our dual wielded pistols, shooting and taking them out as they circle and attack. It’s a great sequence, especially as a contrast to the more slowed exploration section we had just finished. And after we take care of the smaller dinos we’re suddenly and very loudly treated to the much larger T-Rex, which is a tried and true Tomb Raider moment. Here it’s just as good, if not better, than I remember it, and comes away as more iconic in result. The capabilities of modern platforms and game engines provide a vastly improved experience, perhaps raising my blood pressure a smidge as I do my best to escape and complete the demo session.

Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis is a gorgeous take on the original adventure. It adheres — a lot — to that classic, in its narrative and puzzles as well as its gameplay physics, and should satisfy a lot of Lara Croft fans by that virtue. For new or lapsed fans, the visuals alone are worthy of a look, even if the controls may not be what we initially expect.

Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis is due to launch on all platforms on February 12, 2027.