It'll work but you will likely have to lower the graphics options or resolution down, but pretty much everyone will have to do that to varying degrees. It's probably not optimized being a WIP demo, but it runs a lot better than many finished AAA games too.

Ok I've experimented some more and here's what I have found:

- Fullscreen is about 33% faster performance than Windowed Fullscreen, however it also seems to invoke the crash when loading after you die.

- Switching to Windowed Fullscreen loses significant performance, but lowering the resolution and/or graphic effect settings down to High, Medium or lower can regain FPS to make up for it. While in Windowed Fullscreen mode if the game was previously in Fullscreen, there is a chance that ESC will no longer be caught by the game to bring up the game menu or cancel out things, instead the keystroke is passed through to Windows which pops up the Start menu. The game freezes and you can't get back in.

Yeah, the first 20 minutes of the game were solid stable but it is bug after bug the more I'm playing it. Very unlikely that everyone will experience this however as there are countless YouTubers who have made videos without any visible instability, so do not let this discourage others from trying the game out.

A thing like this gets a couple of days before it's shut down for good. Amazing how someone goes through so much trouble and then releases it early, ensuring that it's never finished.

They're even acknowledging in the intro screen that Lara Croft and Tomb Raider are trademarks or registered trademarks of Square Enix Ltd. Do they think that makes it allright? The thing with trademarks - as opposed to copyrights or patents - is that you need to defend them or you lose them. Square Enix can't ignore this.

I guess it's in the realm of possibility that they go "wow" and license the trademark, but they have their own Tomb Raider brand and what's in it for them.

It certainly looks very impressive. What I don't understand is -why bother with the Tomb Raider IP? Any indie original project that looks as good as this would get immediate attention in any gaming forum/community, and they wouldn't have to risk being shut down by the legitimate owner.

I am not that active in gaming communities, but if someone posted about an indie game that looked as good as this one I know I'd keep an eye on it (most indie games seem to use pixel art for a pseudoretro feel, but that's another story).Maybe they have been mentioned before but I missed them. The only one that comes to mind is Hellblade (whose graphical realism immediately caught my attention), and that one is blurring the line between indie and AAA.

I'd be amazed if SE arnt keep an eye on it. I'd be happy to say its safe to say theres a stong possibilty (and like any decent remakes of IPs) once it gets to a certain stage slap them with a C&D. We've seen it recently with Take Two and the Liberty City mod for GTA V.

If you poke around, it appears that he's gotten at least some limited form of nod of approval from official sources so long as the game isn't making money. It's pretty vague as to whether there is anything legally binding in place or not though. Even if he has been given an informal "we wont bother you if you don't profit from it", that's not legally binding and they could send C&D letters at any point, and that's the position a company would want to likely maintain anyway, just doing a non-legally-binding gentleman's handshake sort of thing to give themselves maximum future legal options should they change their mind.

Still, it's cool it has got this far, but definitely no guarantees we'll see anything else, nor that the party wont have a premature end at some point. Ride the fun while the gettin's good as they say... :)

Probably because he's a huge fan of the TR games. He is using the official sound effects from one or more of the games, and if my eyes are not deceiving me he may be using some of the 3D models and game textures from some of the other games as well, perhaps along with some improvements. There just is not enough publicized information as to what exactly him and others created from scratch and what they reused of the existing game franchise assets.

If you load up Tomb Raider Underworld and do a side by side comparison, there are some clear similarities in models and some graphics though, but his demo looks supremely better graphically using the Unreal 4 engine, so even if they are official game assets, he has made them look better.

Note, this is all speculation based on anecdotal observation and comparison with the official game IP. If anyone has Underworld, I recommend installing and comparing the two side by side, or using screenshots of the two. This demo looks better, but similarities appear to suggest asset reuse (which isn't good nor bad, just an perception that may or may not be correct).

The reason I mention the above however, is that it appears most of his effort has been working with Unreal 4 engine and pulling everything together and reusing some of the original IP to get things out there. If he had to also either create all of the 3D models, textures and other game assets himself as he would if making his own 100% original game, he most likely would not have this demo out there right now.

So I would agree that if 100% of what we see in this demo was all 100% original content, artwork, 3D modeling, sound effects, and all other code and data involved, and none of it re-used any previously copyrighted material, and it only used the Tomb Raider trademarks, characters and look and feel but implemented from scratch - making it as his own original unique game would have been a better decision to turn it into a business of creating a new IP. But it'd take a lot more people with a lot more hours of man power to do that, and it does not appear that that was ever his objective.

Pretty clear that the motivation of this is that of a fan of a game series expressing his love for the game franchise itself as a form of art.

Looks so good. Does somebody know when the full game release is coming out?

There is always the possibility that the author will add a hard requirement of some files from the original game.

And the Bloodlines and Metal Gear remakes in both of which cases the publisher was first okay and then suddenly changed their mind. Admittedly Activision shut down the Bloodlines remake the moment the developers began accepting payments but still, fact is that there's never any guarantee that the rightsholders aren't suddenly gonna change their mind unless there's actually a contract that guarantees that the fan project can be brought to completion - but apparently there never is. And frankly... why would there?

Weeell, it's a bit more complicated than that. Yes, there are remakes and ports where the original data is required and the developers of the fan project are virtually invulnerable from a legal standpoint but that's because in case of those projects the only thing distributed for free online is original code.

Just requiring the original data to be present may not be enough in a case like this, where the fan project actually comes with a lot of content that is obviously heavily inspired by trademarked works. Using a character that looks exactly like and is called Lara Croft may pose a really big problem, it's even more problematic than the shit Rockstar is dealing with lately. The only advantage the guys behind this project have is that they aren't making any money off it but that's probably not gonna make them make a stand when the prospect of getting tied up in a legal battle against a huge company with an army of lawyers becomes real.

Ultimately the most probable outcome is that Square Enix will send them a cease and desist letter and all the effort will go down the drain UNLESS their plan B is to replace the protagonist with an original character then. As a matter of fact that would be quite clever because then they would use that public shitstorm for free publicity. I guess Square Enix might still make a case that these guys illegally profited off the Tomb Raider franchise, however, that kind of move was good enough to get Bombshell done and apparently Gearbox gave it a rest once any references to the Duke Nukem franchise were out.

Looks nice ^_^

Thanks for the answer. I really sucked at TR2, got to the underwater diving, rig area and gave up. I think some of it was to do with the drab blue/black pixelated graphics of those particular stages, especially because it was the PSX version. I couldn't differentiate anything there so finding my way through was just torture.