Tomb Raider IV–VI Remastered Review

thesixthaxis.com:

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