Following the postponement of Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis, Amazon has now also confirmed a later release date for Tomb Raider: Catalyst. The new Lara Croft adventure won’t be released until 2028—while, at the same time, further issues surrounding Crystal Dynamics and the TV series are mounting.
Lara Croft’s big comeback on Amazon has hit another snag. Following setbacks with the TV series and a delay in the “reimagining” of Tomb Raider 1, Legacy of Atlantis, Amazon’s head of gaming has now confirmed yet another delay: Lara’s next adventure, Tomb Raider: Catalyst, will now not be released until sometime in 2028.
Remake Postponed to 2027
Jeffrey Gattis, head of Amazon’s gaming division, announced this news rather casually during a conversation with Chris Dring of The Game Business. Discussing Amazon’s gaming strategy and the goal of building a broad game portfolio following the recent relaunch of the Luna streaming platform, Gattis said: “We’ve, of course, announced the two ‘Tomb Raider’ titles: ‘Atlantis’ is coming out on February 12 of next year, and the next one will follow in 2028.”
Amazon had already announced a partnership with Crystal Dynamics, the current developer of the Tomb Raider series, back in 2022. But it wasn’t until last December that the two companies finally revealed the scope of their plans and announced not just one, but two Tomb Raider games. The first, Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis—a remake of the very first Tomb Raider game developed from the ground up—was originally scheduled to be released this year but was already pushed back to February 2027 in June. This could help allay some of the concerns raised by Eurogamer Editor-in-Chief Chris Tapsell,who describes the game as a “strange Double-A.”
Catalyst Also Affected
As for the second game, Tomb Raider: Catalyst, it’s a brand-new installment in the series that takes Lara Croft to India for a new archaeological adventure. Catalyst was originally scheduled to be released in 2027 for PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC—but thanks to Gatti, we now know that won’t be the case.
So the launch of Amazon’s big Lara Croft revival didn’t exactly go smoothly, and there have been other setbacks and controversies as well. In June, it was revealed that Legacy of Atlantis was developed using AI, which, according to Jeff Adams, Director of Experience at Crystal Dynamics, helped the team “get to the right answers faster.” However, when asked to elaborate on this, the interviewer was fobbed off by Amazon’s PR department. As for Amazon Prime’s live-action TV series *Tomb Raider*, filming came to a halt earlier this year when lead actress Sophie Turner suffered a back injury on set; filming has since resumed.
Amid all this, Tomb Raider developer Crystal Dynamics has undergone several rounds of layoffs. In June, the company confirmed a new wave of layoffs affecting 20 employees—this was already the fourth round of layoffs in less than a year.
