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Tomb Raider IV-VI Remastered follows on from last year’s release, bringing another trilogy of Tomb Raider titles to your fingertips, remastered with a fresh coat of paint, and again, for a great price of £25, beyond any sales that’ll come along.
Whereas the first three games were just numbered, the titles of this set are individually titled, beginning with Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation, beginning with Lara at age 16. She’s graduated from Wimbledon High School for Girls and is off to study her A-levels at a prominent boarding school.
After reading an issue of National Geographic, an article on the respected archeologist Professor Werner Von Croy grabs her attention and his intention to tour across Asia, culminating in a potential new discovery to be made in Cambodia.
For number 5, Tomb Raider: Chronicles, with Lara Croft assuming to be dead, there was money to be made by Eidos, so the story is told in a number of flashbacks to various points in her life, using ideas previously not used for game No.4. For some reason, this game escaped me at the time, so this trilogy was my first time playing it.
For No.6, Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness, Lara’s accused of the murder of her mentor, Werner Von Croy, and is now on the run. Along the way you’ll also be able to play as new boy Kurtis Trent, you can talk to other characters which will affect your path throughout the game, a strong narrative with spectacular graphical effects (yes, but all games promise this), massively improved enemy A.I. and a brand new control system which allegedly makes things more “intuitive”. Are they sure?
A lot of things I said about the original trilogy are the same here, in terms of both plusses and minuses – so do check that out. However, it’s worth noting again, that I still 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. Similarly, I can’t jump sideways with modern controls.
For The Last Revelation, there are some glitches in the camera, since it won’t turn a certain way depending on where you are. This would replicate the same sort of issue back in the original game, but then the alternative would be a from-the-ground-up ‘remake’, like The Last Of Us on PS5, and then you’d be paying £70 a game, instead of just £25 for all three.
Also, when killing the alligators in the Times Exclusive on The Last Revelation, they would get stuck by the steps from where I came in, and one of the dogs got stuck in a statue!
And you can shoot apart all the priceless urns you like, but while some will contain ammo etc, others contain deadly creatures! Rather odd for the owners to risk putting useful stuff inside some of them, given that you’d be destroying them! That won’t fly on Antiques Roadshow!
Additionally, the controls are still a bit of a pain to get to grips with, such as when you’re running along, if you’re going at top speed, you can’t jump… Lara just seems to do a forward roll, instead, which is no good if you want to jump.
Similarly, the game occasionally switches to a third person view AND from a different angle, which is really jarring. I can’t see any reason for it.
Plus, when there’s not enough space to do two big jumps in Race for the Iris, you can sometimes just run across the first gap, which feels odd.
Since Chronicles was made by the same time, and with elements of the fourth title, don’t expect such issues to change.
And then we get to Angel of Darkness… Well, when you first play the game, Lara continuously gives you how-to instructions which soon becomes tedious. Lara, please do shut up! For seasoned gameplayers this gets in the way and there’s still no way to turn it off.
I had the same problem of trying to do a standing jump across to another platform, resulting in Lara just taking this request as a sign to hang down from the current platform. Helpful(!)
Oh, and… “massively-improved enemy A.I.”? Err.. no. And the new team, at the time, made it look more flashy without paying any attention to the gameplay, adding pointless elements like a “stealth” mode – a nod to the Metal Gear Solid series – and is something which the walk mode could’ve been used for, surely?
Early on in this, the game actually got stuck when I was simply climbing a ladder and then arrested by the police. I couldn’t get down, he couldn’t get close to arrest me, and the game was stuck in limbo! Good job I saved my position beforehand, but I had to force-quit out of the game!
According to a comment made on one of my videos, “One Dev made a stream of it playing the game and showed what they have done and said they didn’t finish AoD because they couldn’t ended in time. But no worry because updates are coming soon”.
So, Tomb Raider IV-VI Remastered follows the pattern of a lot of games released, in that it’s not actually finished. Clearly, a better result could’ve been made if they’d given it more time, even if it meant saving it for Lara’s next birthday, on February 14th 2026. However, updates can be patched once they’re available.
Until then, you may wish to wait until that happens before you make a purchase. It’ll depend on how busy you are with the first three games. Still haven’t finished them yet? Probably best wait until you have.
Thanks to our friends at Aspyr for the review code for this game.
Tomb Raider IV-VI 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
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GRAPHICS SOUND GAMEPLAY ENJOYMENT |
8 7 6 5 |
| OVERALL | 6.5 |
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.