Tomb Raider I-III Remastered Starring Lara Croft

Genre: Compilation / Action-RPG / 3D Platformer

Players: 1

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Review:

(Note: This game is included in Tomb Raider I-VI Remastered along with Tomb Raider IV-VI Remastered.)

While nowhere near as prominent now as it once was, the Tomb Raider franchise was one of the most important, influential games of the 3D era. When the series’ first game released in 1996 on PC, Sega Saturn, and PlayStation, it stood alongside Super Mario 64 as a demonstration to every other game developer on how to make character-based games in 3D. It also, for better or worse, stood as a demonstration of how to make a successful game with a female protagonist, creating numerous arguments between those who saw series lead Lara Croft as a powerful, confident character with agency… and those who criticized her for pandering to male audiences with skimpy outfits and big boobs.

As the series progressed, it had its ups and downs, but never quite recaptured the massive respect and cultural impact it had when it first launched. It is perhaps for this reason that in addition to multiple releases on various platforms over the years, this release is actually the second time the series’ first game has seen a remake, with 2007 seeing the release of Tomb Raider: Anniversary on numerous platforms. Anniversary not only completely remade the game’s visuals, but added new content, reworked the gameplay mechanics of both shooting and acrobatics, and made small changes to the story.

That is not what we have here in Tomb Raider I-III Remastered. This is a much more faithful remake of the original trilogy of games along with each game’s expansion content, selectable from the games’ menus. This is arguably both a good thing and a bad thing. To be sure, this release is still a pretty extensive reworking of many elements of the original game, but unlike Anniversary, the changes are far more restrained. In fact, players who choose to do so can keep the clunky “tank controls” of the original, and with a press of a button you can instantly return the visuals to their original look, low framerates and all. One of the unexpected joys of this package is pressing the Plus button on the controller to swap back and forth to compare the new visuals to the way the original releases looked.

To that end, the visuals in this release are wonderful. Again, this isn’t an extensive overhaul like what we saw in Anniversary, but it’s still a significant difference, with improved textures, some improved character models (albeit still a bit blocky), better framerates, better-looking water, better lighting and shadows, and new elements like added foliage, cobwebs, and other environmental details. However, this is all still faithful to the way the original game looked, even if at times there’s a new element such as a hole in the roof that wasn’t there in the original to explain where the lighting is coming from. These visuals are paired with the original (extremely ugly, low-framerate) pre-rendered video sequences, along with the original sound and voice acting, with these latter elements actually aging surprisingly well, with the game’s environmental ambient sounds making for some great atmosphere.

As I indicated earlier, players can opt to play with the original game’s “tank” control scheme, but these controls have not aged well, and are extremely awkward by today’s standards. Players can also opt to go into the game’s menus to change to a more modernized control scheme which… while an improvement, still feels stiff, clunky, and at times unresponsive – even with this control scheme, I’ve repeatedly had the game not recognize my inputs properly, and I’m still not sure how you’re meant to do some moves in this mode, like Lara’s sideways jump.

Despite these control issues, the first Tomb Raider still shines thanks to some impeccable level design that even some modern games could learn from. The two sequels… less so. In my opinion, the second and third games have a far more erratic difficulty curve, worse signposting, and do a worse job of indicating where Lara can and cannot walk without slipping down a slope.

Make no mistake, I still enjoyed playing these games, especially the original Tomb Raider, but for all the nice changes Tomb Raider I-III Remastered makes, I wish it had made more. Namely, better modern controls across the board, and better signposting and clearer visual indicators in the two latter games. Still, these are three classic games at their absolute best (if we consider Anniversary different enough to be a separate game), and it is the first time we’ve gotten this entire trilogy on a Nintendo game system. Even with this collection’s flaws, that is absolutely a reason to celebrate.

tl;dr – Tomb Raider I-III Remastered is a lovingly faithful remaster of the original trilogy of highly-influential Action-RPG 3D Platformers. The way this collection lets players choose classic or modern control schemes, and instantly swap between original visuals and some nice remade visuals is excellent, and the superb level design of the first game in particular still shines through. That said, even the modern controls are still pretty clunky, and there are other design issues here that I wish this release ironed out better. This is still a solid port of three classics (well, one classic and its two sequels), but even with all the additions and polish, the age of these games still shows.

Grade: B-

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