The Tomb Raider franchise is coming back in a big way. Multiple games are planned, and a TV series starring Game of Thrones star Sophie Turner is also not far from being released.
At Summer Game Fest, I got the chance to play 20 minutes of one of those games, Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis. This game is a reimagining of Lara Croft’s first adventure and will serve as an anniversary game (though it will miss 2026 by a few months)
The demo opens in a lush jungle, which looks hugely dense and visually impressive. I was quickly introduced to Lara’s new scanner, which points out objects in the environment that can be used as part of puzzles. This feels like a reaction to the visual fidelity of the new game. If everything looks like a high-quality piece of scenery, it’s hard to intuit what is actually interactable.
The puzzle in this section involved finding two large cogs in order to redirect a waterfall. It’s very standard Tomb Raider fare. As I made my way up the mountain to find the first cog, I was impressed by both the visuals and the area’s explorability. Small caves that lead to collectibles added to the sense of exploration.
While the game does have the aforementioned scanner, it isn’t particularly interested in holding your hand, making the exploration of the environment feel far more mechanically relevant, which is vital for a Tomb Raider experience. The puzzle wasn’t complex, but I enjoyed the platforming of climbing up this crumbling tomb.
I didn’t get to hear much of her, but Alix Wilton Regan is a great choice for Lara Croft, and what little I did hear absolutely nailed the tone for gaming’s It Girl of the 90s.
What I wasn’t thrilled with was how Lara controlled. Lara’s jump was floaty and imprecise. It was like platforming with Sackboy from the Little Big Planet series. A few times during my demo, I performed a jump that should have connected to the next platform without issue, but instead saw Lara floating in the air about a foot in front of my intended target.
This continued into the second part of the demo, which saw me running from the iconic T Rex. This chase scene is largely scripted outside of a few jumps that I needed to execute. I didn’t feel confident with any of them.
However, just before this, I was introduced to the highlight of the reimagined adventure. Lara has a new bullet-time mechanic that lets her throw herself into the air. This is, to put it simply, cool. It’s just a genuinely cool mechanic that makes any situation 100x more cinematic. Bullet time is one of gaming’s best and strangely underused mechanics, and it’s just as fun here.
The gunplay felt fine, though the smaller dinosaurs that I was laying into seemed to take an extremely long time to suffer any serious damage.
So far, Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis isn’t the most convincing prospect. It looks brilliant, and the bullet time mechanic is a lot of fun, but there’s certainly room for improvement. The jumping, specifically, simply has to be changed before release or it will make large swaths of the game’s platforming deeply unpleasant.
I’m still keen to play the full game, as this type of third-person globe-trotting adventure isn’t as common these days as when we were getting Uncharted, and the last Tomb Raider reboot series back to back, but hopefully by the time February comes around, my current niggles with Lara’s latest are ironed out.
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