REVIEW | Tomb Raider I-III Remastered Starring Lara Croft

I only learned to appreciate the Tomb Raider games at a later date. One of my nephews was a big fan from the start and I regularly watched him play and thinking in myself how great Lara Croft looked. She was my first videogame crush! I actually started playing it myself when Tomb Raider 3 released, I was ten years old and a new world opened for me. Games with more complex gameplay and controls that required more finesse. I went back and finished them all, including Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness and the more recent Tomb Raider games. They are a crucial part of videogame history so I was beyond excited when I learned that remastered versions were coming in a remastered version.

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Things I liked!

• They don’t make games like this anymore | Maybe Indiana Jones for Xbox will be somewhat similar but the good old Tomb Raider games formula you are not going to find in other game experiences. Yes, Uncharted is heavily based on Lara Croft and so are the new Tomb Raider games (logically). Yet those typical platform-like puzzles and the quest to get somewhere are lost with time. Now all climbable platforms are marked with yellow paint or ribbons and the difficulty comes rather from enemies and you have a mini map so you always know where to go. Basically comes down to how remarkable how lazy a gamer has become in this day and age compared to games of the past. Therefore, it is really great that the original Tomb Raider experiences are preserved, and with a nice lick of paint, for today’s consoles.

Neither good nor bad

• With the press of a button.. magic happens | Visually things do look somewhat better but they haven’t changed the 3D cube look. In other words, you still have ugly edges and weird looking environmental shapes. Aspyr added a more pleasing skybox and longer draw distance. Trees and other vegetation look more real and are more numerous to be found. Biggest difference is with the atmosphere, some places are darker or more bright compared to the original games. A lot of the 2D sprites art has now been transformed to 3D objects, an early example are the skeleton walls in the Peru dungeon. It genuinely looks awesome and being able to switch back in an instant to the older graphics makes it even more impressive. I was happy with the results but negative things began to catch my eye. I don’t understand why or how but occasionally there are textures in caves or environments with lots of plants that don’t match at all what was actually intended in the original games. It seems like the artistic forces made textures without knowing where they ended up. For a game series that meant so much to history, I would have expected this to have been handled more carefully. I myself suspect that automatic upscaling happened that wasn’t checked causing oddities to appear on your TV screen.

• Camera issues | The improved visuals also come with a new camera. This one is slightly closer to Lara’s body, but you only notice that if you switch back to the original graphics. There is a benefit with the new camera angle as you can control it more accurately with the analog stick. Frustration comes kicking in when you start swimming or run around in tight spaces. That’s problamatic as Lara adores corridors or small spaces, as a result the camera is all over the place. Often inside Lara… and not in a pleasant way. I had to go back to the old visuals to pass some sections as the new camera went crazy.

Things I disliked!

• New control scheme | I have never seen a more spectacular failure with a new control method. ‘Modern Controls’ is one of the available two control schemes, the other being the original tank controls from 1990. D-pad controls and visuals have all been designed with a grid pattern in mind. One big difference with games now and in the past is that most games had custom-built game engines. That specific grid-based level design was the holy grail for Tomb Raider. Animations, controls, platforming gameplay and the visuals. Aspyr, the developer behind Tomb Raider I-III Remastered Starring Lara Croft seemingly decided to ‘improve’ the three Tomb Raider games without taking that into account. As a result playing the three remastered Tomb Raider games with modern controls is completely broken The enormous issue with modern controls is that crucial parts of the gameplay don’t work. You can’t turn around to make enough distance for jumps, there isn’t a way to sidejump and you can’t walk slowly to reach cliff edges. Bought the game? Do me a favor and start up the house section in Tomb Raider 2.. there is no way to finish the assault course with modern controls. So this means that one of the bigger reasons to buy this collection is a complete lie. So haven’t those developers noticed that the functionality they took away in modern controls is indeed necessary to finish the game? So moronic, so ridiculous, just unbelievable.

• Manual saving | Lara survived 15 bats, you made some tricky jumps but you mess up. Suddenly Lara’s body is dead on the floor as you fell from a cliff. Or during another moment, you suddenly find yourself face to face with a bear. They don’t purr cute like a cat, they attack you directly and Lara is a tasty lunch. Both stories end with a game over and you will have to restart the level again. There is no auto saving and manually saving isn’t the most user friendly thing. You have to open your menu, go to another menu and select an available save slot. But you have to be careful as loading and saving looks exactly the same so I often reloaded a previous save instead of saving my new progress.