Tomb Raider Is Back!
After nearly four years of silence from Crystal Dynamics, the company has finally confirmed that a new Tomb Raider game is being developed. And that’s not all, because Lara’s new adventure will run on the brand new Unreal Engine 5 (UE5) from Epic Games of Fortnite fame, the most visually stunning game engine in existence. This is a bold move from the company that took over the reins from Core Design and a big shift away from their own in-house developed engine, Foundation Engine, which has been used in all the Tomb Raider games since Legend in 2006. When Shadow Of The Tomb Raider was launched in 2018, I was blown away by how wonderful the game looked, but UE5 is in another league entirely. Many other game developers have now chosen UE5, including the new Witcher, Stalker 2, The Matrix Awakens, Senua Hellblade, and others. And it can’t be ignored that Unreal Engine in its numerous versions is used by major Hollywood studios for their CGI for very good reasons. Just check out this UE5 demo and see for yourself.
But Will My PC Be Good Enough For UE5?
There is another demo of this engine for The Matrix Awakens and an enthusiastic game plugin developer has uploaded an interactive demo that you can install on your PC. There is a link in this Reddit post so that you can download the 18Gb pre-compiled demo. As usual, DCT cannot be held responsible for such external downloads, but I can say that I experienced no problems whatsoever. This is a great way to see Unreal Engine 5 running live on your PC and will give you a real experience of how Lara Croft will look on her next outing to… wherever that may be.
But be warned that the demo hasn’t been fully optimised yet and even with my Ryzen 5600X (six cores, twelve threads), 32GB RAM, and RX 5700 XT 8GB GPU, I was struggling to achieve 30FPS. Either way, if Tomb Raider, which is renowned for its lush locations and panoramas, looks this good, they can take my money right now.
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