Tomb Raider I-II-III Remastered

I played all the Core games when they first appeared, from Tomb Raider 1 through Last Revelation, and consistently replayed them every year or two ever since. So when the "Remastered" games were announced I did something i never do: i pre-bought. And to me it's a slam-dunk, 3 good games for the price of (half) a new one. I haven't stopped playing "Remastered" since it was released.

And as of now (October 2024) the developers Aspyr/Crystal Dynamics announced the release of more Remastered tomb raiders: Tomb 4, 5, 6 drop in early 2025.

If you ever liked the early Tomb Raider games, this is a cheap way to replay the classics with moderately updated graphics and a more realistic looking Lara Croft too.

This has got to be the worst full on remake I've ever played. There's literally 3 good things about it.

1: There's the feeling of nostalgia, the original games great music and the feeling of being transported back to a simpler time in games.

2: They've updated the graphics to a more modern look and you can switch between the new graphics or the original ones with the press of a button.

3: The controls have also been updated and you can choose to play with either the original games tank controls which are and always have been insufferable, or the new, more modern type controls which give you a lot more control over Lara.

That's it, that's the good out of the way.

Now for the bad.

For starters, the new controls, although better than the awful tank controls, don't work on some aspects of the gameplay, this is because the devs didn't bother to update some of the original games design to fit the new controls. This makes some jumping or climbing sections borderline impossible to do and I found myself having to switch back and forth between the controls to do certain parts.

So much of this game is frustration, for instance, there's loads of puzzles that require you to find and pull large blocks into place and instead of modernising the way this is done, allowing you to grab the block and drag it into place in one go, you have to press and hold a button to grab the block, then push or pull in the direction you want to move the block, but this only lasts for one space before you have to repeat the action, so if you need to get a block across a room for instance, you'll have to repeat this 6 or 7 times, it's monotonous as hell.

Even picking up items, you have to position yourself a certain way, then press and hold the button to watch a slow animation scene of you bending down and picking it up, every single time, why not just allow you to press a button once and the item is in your inventory quickly so you can get on with the game? These are things that should have been so easy to implement.

The graphics, while no where near as impressive as some, in fact, most of the new game remakes that have come out this last 4 or 5 years, are better than the original ones which look awful by todays standards. But man oh man, did the devs not bother to play test this game? Using the new graphics makes the game impossible to get through, everything, literally everything, is so dark, so gloomy, that you can't see anything. You can't find your way around because everything is almost black, you can't find items because you can't see them, seriously, if this is an issue they had with the software they were using then at least give Lara a torch or something because the only way to enjoy this thing is to play it with the original graphics switched on, which, as I've already said, look awful. Retro yes, but still awful.

There's tons of bugs and glitches in this, I've been stuck in the wall and floor while underwater and drown several times, enemies that you kill will sometimes float in mid air, it's a mess.

The sound, OMG the sound, they have done NOTHING with it. All the music (which admittedly was always awesome anyway) is the same as the original but the gun shots, the enemies and the dialogue are all the same, they've not updated any of it and it's terrible. Gunshots sound hollow, the enemy and animal noise are laughable. Gorillas sound like dogs with a cheetah screech, crocodiles sound like you're dragging a tin bath along a stone floor, lions sound like a poorly rendered bobcat, it's just lazy game design.

Don't even get me started on the load/save feature, it's the worst I've ever come across in any modern game, it killed the experience for me. There's no autosave feature which is unforgivable, so unless you're saving the game manually every 30 seconds you'll end up doing the same section of game over and over and over again. The manual save feature is so clunky and awkward, they put the load option before the save option so when opening the menu, if you're already frustrated or you do an accidental double press of the joypad or just have your brain switched off in casual gamer mode, you'll end up loading a pre saved game instead, when trying to save the game at an important jump or outside an enemy room. I've done this so many times and had to replay entire levels over to get back to where I was, it's infuriating.

This is without doubt, the single laziest modern remake I have played, apart from a graphics upgrade, which you can barely use because of the awful lighting and a choice of controls and the already mentioned burst of nostalgia you get from playing the OG games, they have done nothing else to it, the sound is dreadful, the controls clunky at best, there's almost no work gone into fixing any of the issues the original games had, it's all just just been left, it's literally the original games with a new lick of paint, shoved out quickly to make as much cash as quickly as possible. Absolutely the least amount of effort possible has gone into these, even the cut scenes haven't been redone, they're the same as in the old games and they're ugly as sin.

This should have been an easy set of games to remake and update, they were already classics, flawed classics and a product of thier time but classics none the less. Just make them more accessible to play, better sound, graphics, controls, maybe expand on some areas to give a bit more depth, streamline other things that didn't work in the originals, iron out the bugs and glitches or the things people didn't like. They nailed this with games like the Resident Evil remakes, Dead space etc absolutely great remakes and then there's this. Rent or buy a games license, slap a bit of gloss on the graphics, make the controls modern and then push it out for sale, it's disrespectful.

Oh, there's a trigger warning at the start of the game to warn you that women with big boobs are offensive and people from other cultures looking, sounding and being depicted as people from other cultures is offensive so that's something somebody put effort into.

Seriously, if you really want to own the original games as they were made, awful graphics, glitches, controls an all, then you may get something from this but if, like me, you expected a remake to be a massive step up in terms of graphics, sound, game design and gameplay, avoid this like the plague.

The only thing I got from this outside of the hours of frustration, is the appreciation of how good we have it these days with newer games. It highlights just how awful the controls and graphics on older games were, even though at the time, we all thought they were groundbreaking.

To start this review I want to mention I love some of the tomb raider games like tomb raider legend in 2006 was great but this remastered trilogy was a real shame and such a waste of great potential, I played the game for about 20 minutes and the controls felt stiff, unresponsive and the jumping mechanics are just broken! Jumping feels stiff and buggy moving you towards the nearest wall or into a hole. I was looking forward to trying this game but it was another disappointment in modern gaming! I know is was remastered by ASPYR who have done some great remasters on the classic star wars games they where fantastic but this remastered trilogy just wasn't good in my honest opinion.

I never played the original games so I take they are similar with trash controls like this one? I at least think they could of improved the controls to something more modern, responsive.

My copy of the game will be getting sold as I wasted my money on this broken game, so please if you seen my review play the reboot of tomb raider from 2013 on wards they are much better controls than this game, not recommended at all waste of money.