Also on: PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, Nintendo Switch
Publisher: Aspyr
Developer: Aspyr/Crystal Dynamics
Medium: Digital
Players: 1
Online: No
ESRB: T
Here’s the key thing you need to remember going into Tomb Raider IV-VI Remastered: these games weren’t good to begin with.
I mean, we can talk about whether Aspyr did a good job of making the three lesser original Tomb Raider games look and feel more modern, but at the end of the day they can only work with what they were given. You can add a layer of gloss to a piece of garbage to make it look all shiny and new, but at the end of the day, it’s still just shiny garbage.
To be fair, of course, there’s also a huge difference in quality between the three games here. You could probably argue that Tomb Raider IV, The Last Revelation, was at least solid when it first came out in 1999. It hasn’t aged all that well – more on that shortly – but it at least achieved a basic level of competency. The same couldn’t be said for fifth and sixth Tomb Raider games, Chronicles and The Angel of Darkness: both were widely panned when they came out, and the ensuing decades haven’t been kind to their respective legacies.
All of which is to say, if you’re interested in Tomb Raider IV-VI Remastered because you want to play something good, you probably shouldn’t be. For that matter, it’s also probably not worth it if you’re interested in the game because you want to play it for historical reasons, either.
Who should play it, then? Much like the first remastered trilogy, your best bet is if you’re after a heavy dose of nostalgia – because, really, otherwise it’s hard to imagine you enjoying yourself very much. While it’s neat to be able to flick back and forth between the original and the “remastered” graphics with the click of a button, the novelty wears off pretty quickly. Once that’s gone, you’re left trying to play games that feel like they were engineered for another era, which isn’t an experience I’d recommend.
Again, this is similar to last year’s trilogy, where the tank controls probably felt second nature to anyone who lived through them the first time around but were baffling to everyone else, and the “modern” controls felt anything but modern. The game tries its best to give you a tutorial and nudge you along, but more often than not, it’ll just leave you baffled – like when you learn that you can’t just run and jump off a ledge, you have to tap back to get a running start, then hold the action button while jumping to make sure you grab the ledge correctly. On top of that, you’ve got to deal with camera angles that occasionally shift without warning, forcing you to account for sudden changes in perspective. Even if you try using a guide, chances are you’ll get frustrated by it long before you master it. (And, for that matter, it should probably tell you something that even the “modern” controls need a guide to make sense of them.)
Obviously, if Tomb Raider IV-VI Remastered hits your nostalgia just right, none of that matters, and you’ll enjoy getting the chance to play some old favourites again on modern hardware. But without that sense of nostalgia, you’ll be left with a trio of games that weren’t all that good first time around, and it’s hard to imagine you’ll find them very worthwhile.
Aspyr provided us with a Tomb Raider IV-VI Remastered PC code for review purposes.
