Tomb Raider I-II-III Remastered Review

In case you’ve been sleeping under a rock for the last 30 years (or not born), the Tomb Raider series first began in 1996 and is an action adventure franchise that combines platforming, firefights, puzzle solving and as you’d expect tomb exploration. While you can try to find your way directly to the end of each level, you can explore areas in hope of finding treasures/collectibles. While each game has its own plot/storyline, they don’t differ much as its always centers around Lara Croft looking for a mysterious artefact.

Tomb Raider I-II-III Remastered package contains, obviously, first three games along with their individual expansions. When start each game you’re free to jump into the core game or its expansion. For the first game, it includes Unfinished Business, whereas the sequels features Golden Mask and The Lost Artifact respectively.

The Tomb Raider games are third person action game where players, in the proverbial shoes of Lara Croft, as they explore various areas to collect treasures and find your way to the mysterious artefact. Lara can run, jump, roll, shoot, swim and walk. What makes it different than typical platformers is that you cannot simply jump on a platform; you need to grab specific ledges to be able to climb up. Swimming work suprisingly well compared to other more recent gaming ventures.

Given their ages, you can expect a lot of crypticness. Unlike today where more often than not we’re given direction as to where to go or clear objectives, in these games you’ve thrown in the level and it’s like “have fun”. You’ll need to run around and explore each level to find expendable items, hidden treasures and keys to keep progressing. But if you find a lock before the key, you’ll need to remember where it is because once you find the key, you’ll need to find your way back.

One of the game’s useful feature is the ability to save anywhere, anytime. Once you’ve clear a few tricky sequences, you can save so you don’t have to go back through whatever you’ve successfully completed. Just be careful because navigating to save the game default to loading the last save, so make sure to change to save. The compass is also unnecessary.

The game looks fine. They developers redid the visuals to give them a more modern look; and it does look great, but obviously don’t expect AAA visuals like in Starfield or Call of Duty. The developers also added the nifty option to swap between original polygonal visuals and the new 2024 visuals. And you’ll definitely want to make good use of it because some areas with the newest visuals are too dark, so you’ll need to switch to old school visuals to see what’s up ahead or find helpful items. On the audio side of things, it’s borderline non existent. You do you the typical atmospheric soundbytes from what you’d expect for jungles and other exotic places, but other than that it’s silence.

Given the age of these game, you can already expect what the first problem is: controls. While the game gives you the choice between tank and modern controls, the former is bad. Real bad. Worst than classic Resident Evil games. Whereas the latter, while giving a bit more freedom in movement, the camera becomes incredibly janky and problematic when roaming around corners or attempting precise jumping. Speaking of jumping. It works… when it wants to. You can easily attempt the same jump 20 times and have a handful of different landing.

You’ll either not even jump because the game didn’t feel like responding, jump too far, jump not far enough or bump into the wall and fall down. It’s easy to forget that you *have* to press the grab button as Lara won’t grab ledges automatically. Combat is also quite unbalanced. Spiders take an inane amount of bullets to kill; moreso than tigers. The games have auto-aim… as long as the enemies stay in Lara’s line of sight. If you also try to kill enemies while moving, given that you’re locked in, the movement is highly restricted meaning if you’re near a cliff, 99% of the time, you’ll fall to your death.

The detection system is also incredibly picky and irritating. To pick up items or interact with interactive objects, you need be pixel perfect on the exact pixel. Otherwise, even if above or under the object, you won’t get the ! prompt confirming it can be interacted with. Also using roll too much during combat can be dizzying because of the flickery camera. It’s also a great reminder that older games were famous of being where the f*ck do I go kinda of games. If you’re not in the mood to explore, a guide or walkthrough is necessary.

While I understand the age behind the three games, I absolutely cannot recommend Tomb Raider I-II-III Remastered to anyone, unless you’ve played the originals back in the day. Even then given the progress made in gaming since, it will be frustrating trying to acclimate yourself back to these archaic control scheme. And somehow the new modern control scheme is even worst than the tank one. I will give the developers behind this remastered bundle an A for effort for the nostalgia factor, but if you’re new to the series, avoid this bundle at all costs and play the more recent trilogy instead.