Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis was announced at The Game Awards 2025 alongside a companion title, Tomb Raider: Catalyst (a brand-new adventure set for 2027). Legacy of Atlantis arrives in 2026 for PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC — and it is not just a remaster. It is a complete reimagining.

Why Remake the Original Now?

Crystal Dynamics has a specific answer to this question: the 30th anniversary of Tomb Raider. The original 1996 game launched the franchise, defined a character, and created a genre. It deserves a celebration worthy of its legacy — and the technology now exists to do it properly.

Head of Studio Scott Amos called it "a love letter by fans, all of us, for fans." Game director Will Kerslake was even more precise: "We want to honor the legacy of that original game by modernizing it with a gameplay experience and a fidelity that's now possible in Unreal Engine 5. 30 years of technology have happened since 1996. Our goal is to make it feel like it felt when you played it the first time — but play like a modern game."

This is the second remake of the original Tomb Raider — the first being Tomb Raider: Anniversary in 2007. But where Anniversary was built on the technology of its era, Legacy of Atlantis has no technical limitations. Everything the 1996 game gestured at can now be fully realized.

A Reimagining, Not a Remaster

Crystal Dynamics is emphatic about the distinction between "remaster" and "reimagining." Legacy of Atlantis is built from scratch in Unreal Engine 5 — not upscaled, not graphically enhanced, but entirely rebuilt.

What that means in practice: environments that existed as pre-rendered backgrounds in 1996 are now fully three-dimensional, explorable spaces with geometry, lighting, and physical detail the original could never achieve. Locations from the original game — the jungles of Peru, the ancient ruins of Greece, the deserts of Egypt, a mysterious Mediterranean island — are all present, but transformed into environments that feel genuinely alive and dangerous.

The iconic moments are all confirmed to return. The bridge and the wolf den. The T-Rex encounter — one of gaming's most famous moments — reimagined as a full modern action-adventure set piece designed to create "a new core memory for players who've never gotten to experience it the first time, or if you're a longtime fan, you now get to experience it as a first time again."

Co-developed with Flying Wild Hog (the studio behind Shadow Warrior 3), Legacy of Atlantis combines Crystal Dynamics' Tomb Raider expertise with Flying Wild Hog's technical proficiency in delivering fast, fluid character action.

A New Lara, A New Voice

Alix Wilton Regan steps into the role of Lara Croft — taking over from Camilla Luddington, who voiced Lara through the survivor trilogy (Tomb Raider 2013, Rise of the Tomb Raider, Shadow of the Tomb Raider). Regan is a British actress perhaps best known to gaming fans as the female protagonist option in Dragon Age: Inquisition, and as a character Crystal Dynamics had originally planned to cast as Joanna Dark before the Perfect Dark project was cancelled.

The choice signals something important: this is a different Lara. Not the survivor Lara of the reboot trilogy, and not the campy 1990s Lara of the originals. This is an origin-era Lara — younger, more assured, somewhere between the raw adventurer of the 1996 game and the hardened survivor of 2013. Her voice and performance will define how this version of the character is received by a generation meeting her for the first time.

The Gameplay: Classic Spirit, Modern Design

The original Tomb Raider was famous — and often frustrating — for its instant death traps, trial-and-error puzzle design, and tank controls that placed precision movement at the center of survival. Legacy of Atlantis keeps the spirit while updating the experience.

Kerslake confirmed: "Part of reimagining a game is adjusting that game, evolving for modern player tastes. But it is core to the Tomb Raider experience that there are puzzles, combat, traversal, and death-defying action." Rolling balls, collapsing platforms, ancient mechanisms — the environmental design DNA of the original remains intact. The T-Rex is there. The iconic architectural traps are there. What changes is how they feel to navigate in a game built for modern control sensibilities.

The game emphasizes exploration, puzzle-solving, combat, and traversal — the four pillars of Tomb Raider from its very first outing. Lara hunts for the Scion — the scattered artifact at the heart of the original game's story — across four distinct regions, facing lethal predators, deadly mechanisms, and the ancient mysteries of civilizations lost to time.

What Else Is Coming: Tomb Raider: Catalyst

Legacy of Atlantis is not the only Tomb Raider project Crystal Dynamics revealed at The Game Awards 2025. Tomb Raider: Catalyst — an entirely new adventure — was announced simultaneously for 2027, set in Northern India. Two games, two eras of Lara Croft, both in active development. The franchise's future has never looked more expansive.

Crystal Dynamics also confirmed the Amazon Prime Video Tomb Raider TV series is in active production, though details remain under embargo for now. The convergence of game releases, a new Lara, and a television adaptation signals the most ambitious moment for Tomb Raider as a franchise since Lara's 2013 reboot reinvented her for a new era.

Conclusion

The original Tomb Raider deserves a remake that can do it justice — one that captures the wonder, the danger, and the sense of discovery that made 1996 players feel like genuine explorers while finally giving the environments, the characters, and the iconic moments the visual and mechanical realization they always warranted.

Legacy of Atlantis is that remake. Built from scratch. Thirty years of technology. One of gaming's greatest adventure games, reborn.

Lara Croft is coming back to Peru. The Scion is waiting. And this time, the T-Rex has never looked better.