Skip to content
Tomb Raider I-III Remastered does what it says on the tin, and all for a mere snip of just £20, give or take, depending on any sales or discounts you can find.
I won’t go through the full plot of each title, as these games cover the period from 1996-1998, with the first taking you, as Lara Croft, to find the Scion, an artefact within the tomb of Qualopec, amongst the Peru mountains, before there’s more work to do.
The second game revolved around the dagger of Xian, while Part III had an impressive FMV opener for the time, showing how research company RX Tech picked up unusual readings from a meteorite’s impact zone, and sailor from Charles Darwin’s voyage on The Beagle had travelled to and died in several places, giving you multiple locations to visit, one item you need being the legendary Infada artefact, along with a later separate release for what would now be DLC, in The Lost Artefact.
As the games progressed, new moves were added, such as how in the second game, some walls are climbable, so Lara can climb up a wall by pressing Up and Action to jump and hang onto a hand-hold. Pressing the cursor keys will move her in the direction required, and jump will make Lara jump backwards away from the wall.
Then in No.3, need a quick burst of energy? Don’t have another doughnut, just press the Sprint key. A small energy bar will appear and when that bar depletes Lara will revert back to a run. Plus, Lara was able to ‘duck and crawl’, as well as performing a Monkey Swing.
However, one thing I haven’t been able to figure out with this Remastered release is that I can’t jump backwards with modern controls, and have to change back to old tank controls for that, but I’m not keen on those for general use. Part-way through my video for Jungle, the first level of the third game, I had to crawl into a tight space to pick up a secret, but I couldn’t just back out the same way. I had to go into the menu system to change control method to tank, temporarily, unless I wanted to join the other old fossils for eternity.
In getting back into these games for the first time in over 20 years – and even back in the day, I can only actually remember completing the first of these, the level design is even more intricate and clever than I remember, and when it comes to finding secrets, such as the first one in the first game, you soon learn these act like lenticular art, in which the image appears to change with the perspective of the viewer. Hence, you’ll miss it on first viewing, but walk around the area a bit, and you realise the ledge and raised plinth you need were previously blending in with its surroundings, making this quite genius.
However, I will point out that if you’re not sure where to go, while using the remastered visuals, it’s helpful to switch back to the original graphics, temporarily, as it clears away a lot of the fancy fauna and flora, and shows a clearer path.
And while this new version does give us lovely, flowing 60fps graphics – with my videos in 4K – alas, the camera angles are still just as iffy as they always were, such as when you crawl under a rock, plus other places you’ll come across – such as running into a wall and trying to turn around – where all bets are off as to how it performs. Then again, if you want a complete remake from the ground up, like The Last Of Us Part I Remake, expect to pay £60 per game!
Tomb Raider I-III Remastered is also a lot more difficult than I remember. So, if you’re expecting a full walkthrough on all three games any time soon, you’ll be disappointed, because it’s often a bloody hard game, and I keep dying every two seconds. In fact, when I made my gameplay for the Jungle level, I was surprised that while I was focused on all six secrets, I was amazed I found all 3 pickups!
One major tip: Be careful to save and load in the correct slots, so you’re not overwriting progress, nor loading in a previous save when you meant to be SAVING, and thus undoing a lot of hard work.
The only bad part, in a way, is that as I’m rather older than I was in 1996, I am a bit angsty about just bumping off random lions, tigers and other animals that just happened to be there, and it’s ME who’s the invader!
Additionally, this release also includes the three expansion packs from the original games, namely: Unfinished Business, The Golden Mask, and the aforementioned, The Lost Artefact. Plus, it’s interesting that developers Aspyr are also considering remastered The Last Revelation and Chronicles. Perhaps they can also have a bash at Angel of Darkness, given how awful the controls were.
One final note is that an additional element was how some people were moaning that a warning has been added to this new release, stating it contains “offensive depictions of people and cultures rooted in racial and ethnic stereotypes”, and how it’s best to put a warning in and retain the content, rather than try to remove it. They’ve taken the best option with this, and I understand an update had to be actioned in order to stop a mod from removing the text.
Maybe it’s because I’m getting older, but to the guys who made the mod, it’s 2024, just go with it, and pick your battles rather than trying to win every last little battle in life. You’ll get more enjoyment out of life if you do, since, as they say, you can’t fight City Hall.
Overall, Tomb Raider I-III Remastered is certainly the best release we’ll see for a long while – certainly in an official capacity, and for the price, it gives the games a great polished look, whilst retaining the original feel, even if it also retained those awful camera angles.
Thanks to our friends at Aspyr for the review code for this game.
Tomb Raider I-III Remastered is out now on PC/Steam, and the respective online stores for PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S and Nintendo Switch.
Important info:
- Developer: Aspyr
- Publisher: Aspyr
- Players: single-player
PC specs:
CPU: AMD RYZEN 9 7950X3D
Motherboard: MSI MPG X670E CARBON WIFI AMD X670 S AM5 DDR5 PCIe 5.0 4x M.2 2.5GbE AMD EXPO™ ATX
RAM: 64GB (2x32GB) Corsair DDR5 Vengeance RGB PC5-44800 (5600Mhz)
Graphics Card: Sapphire Radeon RX 7900 XTX NITRO+ 24GB GDDR6 Ray-Tracing RDNA3 6144 Streams
1st Storage Drive: 2TB Samsung 990 PRO M.2 (2280) PCIe 4.0 (x4) NVMe SSD TLC V-NAND 7450MB/s Read 6900MB/s
|
GRAPHICS SOUND GAMEPLAY ENJOYMENT |
8 9 7 10 |
| OVERALL | 8.5 |
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.