I’ll freely admit to being one of those charlatans who preferred the Tomb Raider reboot trilogy from the originals. And if that doesn’t rile you up, know that I’m also 43 years old, and played and loved the originals back in the day. But that was back in the day, when Tomb Raider was genre-defining. I retain cherished memories of how the game made me feel to play it and experience it for the first time, but I’m rarely fooled by nostalgia. Retro games are all well and good, but I find it hard to believe anyone truly prefers the originals as they were. It was my issue with Tomb Raider I – III Remastered, and my continued issue with Tomb Raider IV to VI Remastered.
Case in point is the movement. Playing them with the old “tank controls” is awkward and cumbersome, but playing them with new classic controls just doesn’t feel right. It’s hard to line up jumps properly, hard to read the room during combat and dodge or shoot the right way. Improving the graphics and textures is one thing, but it doesn’t change the fact that these games are old and, more crucially, still feel old despite attempts to modernise.
It wasn’t an issue I felt with the recent remaster of the Soul Reaver games, which admittedly had a more solid foundation than the three games offered in this package. While IV, The Last Revelation, had something going for it, Chronicles wasn’t great, and Angel of Darkness was never good. It feels less egregious playing it now beside the others, but I remember just not enjoying it upon release and it’s not an exclusive opinion.
In this remaster, Angel of Darkness comes with restored content and improved movement, but it doesn’t change the fact that it’s badly paced and features odd mechanics that even now feel experimental. The forced stealth sections, for example, that felt more like the developer struggling to keep up with an evolving industry and arguably paved the way for the complete change of direction in the 2012 reboot.
Since we’ve already gone out of order, we might as well look at Chronicles next, a hodgepodge of mini Lara Croft adventures in a Hitman: Contracts vein. It marked the beginning of the series’ decline in quality, though, and was occasionally weirdly obtuse in a time when you had to wait for games magazines to release with the guides in them. Very little changed mechanically in the original release and that’s the same here.
As for Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation, well it was the last good Tomb Raider until 2012. It was still adhering to the original formula at this point, before an ever-changing industry and increasingly demanding market forced experimentation and uncomfortable change. It takes place largely in one setting and features less globe-trotting than the other instalments, but the focus on puzzles over action mean less frustrating shoot-outs, so smiles all round.
In any case, it’s probably unfair to criticise Tomb Raider IV – VI Remastered for not fixing everything; after all, that’s what the reboot attempted to do with varying degrees of success. And there will be a lot of people who get a great deal of enjoyment from this package as they did with the last trilogy remaster.
I also can’t fault the effort Crystal Dynamics have put in to fix the movement and improve the aesthetics. The details are much crisper, with sharper, brighter and more vibrant environments. Being able to switch to the old skins at will is always welcome if for nothing else but scientific enquiry, and fans of the original series will no doubt have their nostalgia muscles well massaged by the package. Sadly it just requires a lot more than a graphical overhaul and some restored content to fix what weren’t particularly great games in the first place.