For I bought Tomb Raider Legend, for the PC.
The game got a nice review from one of those game review websites, and sounded pretty good from their description, if a bit short.
To sweeten the deal for me, I saw that Future Shop was offering the game for $40 Cdn last week, and bundled with the game were the two Tomb Raider movie DVD's.
However all this week I've been reading more and more angry posts over at the Eidos Tomb Raider Legend forum. It seems that the only happy people are the ones who bought the game for either the Playstation or the X-Box, and maybe the owners of the very latest ultra fast PC's, that
come equipped with an N-Vidia graphics card.
Even then a PC owner may not be very happy as the game controls have been totally buggered, with all new keys assigned, and many of Lara's traditional moves gone completely.
I am also reading many reports that Lara is nearly as uncontrollable as she was in that disaster of an unfinished game called Angel of Darkness.
My PC falls between the "recommended" specifications and the "advanced", with just my graphics card being a bit weak.
Also my DVD drive is only a 2X, while a 4X is listed on the box as minimum. But all that meant was that it took a damn long time to install the game.
My gaming experience?
The cut scenes work perfectly, BUT Lara herself is nearly uncontrollable. She takes forever to notice my keyboard commands, yet she will turn immediately in the direction I set the camera view to with the mouse, and start running in that direction.
She often starts jumping, running, squatting, sneaking, etc. at random without any input from me. This made it impossible for me to complete the "training level" in Bolivia, although I tried and tried. (I did have a good laugh though when she took it into her head to run off a cliff and fall to her death, although her new voice and scream while she falls is nowhere near as cool to listen to as her TR1 voice was.
)
I have the latest sound card drivers installed as recommended, but there was an annoying wap-wap-wap-wap-wap sound behind the music and background sounds at all times. I was able to ignore it after a while, but why should I have to?
My rating of the game so far is 1 out of 10. It gets a 0.5 for the nice graphics in a TR engine, even though they're no better than UT 2004's, if that good. It gets 0.25 for the laugh it gave me when Lara committed suicide on her own, and 0.25 for letting me manipulate the camera controls so I could look down Lara's top, and see that her boobs really are full of silicone.
It appears that this is another game from Eidos that I will have to put away for a year or more, until someone out there in cyberspace comes up with a fix for the game. Lord knows Eidos is incapable of such a thing. Their patches for earlier TR games never fixed anything, and it was over a year after I bought TR 4 before I could play it, and then only because someone out there figured out a fix that worked.
