Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis Could Be Great, But There's Some Things We Can't Ignore...

Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis

Editorial callout

"Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis Could Be Great, But There's Some Things We Can't Ignore..."

Addressing the T-Rex in the room.

Posted : Sep 5, 2026 10:00am UTC

The first thing that strikes you upon seeing the new Tomb Raider live-demoed on a massive 115” TV mere inches from your face, I can attest, is its visual fidelity: Legacy of Atlantis is absurdly pretty. Crammed with fine detail enough that every particle of dust and bat guano flitting through the stale air poses danger to your airways, it almost feels like it’s supposed to be funny when compared to the chunky textures and pointy polygons of the 32-bit original.

The game’s director Raul Siqueira puts it nicely during our session: “the secret to a good remake is knowing what to change, and what to leave well alone”. Absolutely. Preserving the essence of a thing is much more vital than slavishly recreating the original work, and this is certainly something that Legacy of Atlantis understands, aesthetically at least. It is unmistakably a modern interpretation of Lara Croft’s seminal adventure, an essential piece of gaming history arguably as important as Super Mario Bros . or Chuckie Egg (ask your dad).

This latest preview focuses on LoA’s interpretation of the Damocles Room, the infamous chamber of raining swords that caused instant death for the uncareful while sifting through the tombs of ancient Greece. It’s a frighteningly vertical space, one that cemented Tomb Raider’s reputation for traversal-puzzles and terrifying jumps that make your insides curdle. Legacy of Atlantis preserves these aspects and then some, the feeling of being a tiny speck of human in an impossibly deep cavern of flakey pillars and dusty godrays made all the more potent by the sheer graphical prowess on offer. That fine detail, that premium fidelity, it stretches off into the distance and pulls off a sense of scale that could only be hinted at on PS1 hardware. Or PS2 hardware. Or PS3, for that matter.

And these swords that dangle so menacingly, they’re big. They’re almost house-sized.. The big twist in this version of the Damocles Room is that, rather than being deadly obstacles, the swords are helpful almost to the point of politeness: they’re needed for traversing the space, as Lara can now perch on their hilts after they’ve dropped. And in stark contrast to bat poop, the dropping itself barely poses any danger. The swords are easily dodged, and their drops can be triggered from a safe distance by shooting at them, rendering them little more than another minor inconvenience that Lara gets to solve with hot lead.

Much like the poor leopard she encounters on the way here, on which the camera lingers majestically as she delivers a breathless “magnificent” right before shooting it in the face. I thought this was hilarious and burst out laughing involuntarily, which turned out to be massively out of step with the rest of the room. I even asked the devs about this in the following Q&A: “Is that meant to be funny?”

No, basically. While Lara has no shortage of handy quips, delivered with requisite English public-school plummyness by the wonderful Alix Wilton Regan, this is I’m assured a serious game with a serious tone. So anyone expecting a modicum of self-awareness from this third distinct version of Lara’s original adventure, not counting the recent remaster, will be disappointed.