Almost 30 years on from its debut, Tomb Raider is still one of the most recognisable names in gaming. Sure, we’re quite far removed from the series’ heyday, and are currently in a lull for both the modern games and movies, but Lara Croft’s adventures haven’t been entombed and forgotten by the public. Revisiting the original games seems like a great idea, to go back and have a look at where it all started. After playing these remakes, I have to say that maybe they are better left in our memories where the nostalgia can do all the heavy lifting.
Now let’s get this straight, the remasters here are precisely what you expect them to be. We’ve got better quality textures, better lighting, and much better quality character models, which if you’re not familiar with the original PlayStation, didn’t really have many more polygons than the absolute minimum needed for a humanoid silhouette. You can jump between the new remastered visuals to the original graphics with the press of a button – something that still amazes me every time I see it, even if it’s a common trick for retro remasters.
But this second trilogy of Tomb Raider games is a bit different from the first, jumping ahead a generation to Angel of Darkness for the PS2 – Core Design’s sixth and final game in the series. After playing the first two games it can be a little hard to tell if you’re looking at a remastered version or the original in Angel of Darkness, until you examine things a little more closely. Lara’s model is the biggest giveaway, which is noticeably improved, but with the environments it’s hard to really spot the difference, some things even look untouched.
The biggest issue here is that this isn’t the ground breaking original Tomb Raider trilogy, it’s the second trilogy where Lara didn’t really know what to do with herself. The first two games are very much in line with their predecessors mostly, but even in the late 90s they were critiqued for retreading increasingly familiar ground. Heck, Core Design even tried to kill off their iconic heroine in The Last Revelation, only to have to create a kind of narrative clip show for Chronicles, while another team worked to bring her back for a jump to the new generation.
Angel of Darkness looked to revitalise the series, though making Lara into some kind of anti-hero in one of the weirder turns I’ve seen a series take. It’s not very good either, nor is it good at making it clear where you’re supposed to be going in the streets and rooftops of Paris that replace the tombs you’d expect to be raiding earlier on. There’s some cut content that’s been restored here with the Parisian Back Streets training area, and some other tweaks to subtly improve Angel of Darkness’ flaws, but these three games just aren’t Tomb Raider 1-3, which makes me far less willing to forgive the issues that remain.
Controls are still the biggest problem with these games, even if you still have the muscle memory from playing the original releases. The difficulty in these games comes almost entirely from absolutely horrendously bad tank controls, as they’re known, where left and right turn your character on the spot instead of strafing. Every single little thing you do, whether it’s pulling a lever, reaching a ledge, jumping for a rope, whatever, is made into a frustrating battle with the controls whilst you try to maneouvre yourself into just the right position.
A simple jump isn’t simple anymore, because you have to ensure you’re positioned perfectly beforehand, so it becomes a case of stopping and rotating on the spot before you can continue. Are you lined up right to grab that rope from a jump, or will you end up being two inches too far to the left? It doesn’t feel like “real” difficulty – as in, Dark Souls is difficult but it’s a challenge that’s fun to surmount, these remasters never feel challenging, they just feel annoying and success is just relief that you’re finally rid of whatever fiddly rubbish you were doing rather than celebrating overcoming a challenge.
As with the first batch of remasters, this trilogy does also come with a modern control setting that allows you to, shockingly, point your analog in a direction and move in that direction rather than turning like a tank. This is a little bit better when walking around but, once you get into a small platform that you need to rotate on so you can position yourself, you’ll likely walk off the edge trying to do it. There’s also the awkwardness of moving when the camera switches to fixed positions, and more generally, the run animation has to end for a moment before you can start moving again.. These games were designed with tank controls in mind, so annoying as they are, manoeuvring without them is almost as frustrating.
There isn’t much else to say really. The first two games look nicer than they once did, the third looks almost the same, and other than that the games are so old that they came from before controls stopped being terrible. I’ve always wondered why I didn’t really like the Tomb Raider games, never made much progress, and mostly messed around in the mansion. It turns out it’s because they’re bad? If Aspyr decide the remake the next trilogy of Tomb Raider games, though, it will begin with Tomb Raider Legend, the first genuinely good Tomb Raider because Lara, the titular tomb raider, can climb a wall without five minutes of prep first.
