I'm genuinely starting to think that nostalgia might actually be a mental disorder. I can't fathom the high ratings on this. And for some reason it's much higher than the individual games. At their time they were ok, though I never got into it much aside from playing through the demo on PC. But by todays standards, this is just unadulterated jank. It quickly becomes a chore with its unfathomably poor camera that seems to intentionally work against you. When firing at enemies the camera often looks at you rather than your target, in small spaces it flips around and messes up your controls. A really bad example of this is in the first TR2 map. As you walk into a room, two boulders come after you, and without pausing the action the camera goes to them. The issue being that as that happens, it also reverts your controls so you end up running towards them. Then it suddenly switches to a view in front of you, so if you're holding forward, you're running right into them. With tank controls it works, but aside of resident evil, I just can't use them. Especially for an acrobatic game like this. It's just so stiff and slow that everything is a chore. I can't believe no one in the making of this thought to put modern controls to analogue and tank to digital, or have the one unused controller button be a switch between them.

Then there's the button delay. I ended the first game with over 600 saves. All thanks to half my jumps not registering and I ended up saving for pretty much every single jump.

As far as the combat goes, it's as bad as anything else. Enemy ai is simply enemies moving towards you and balling up all around you as the camera spins around trying to track one. Though with more than one you can't even tell who. This is another thing that probably works better on tank controls as you can move backwards and shoot, but then again you lose the ability to run circles around certain enemies and shoot them in the side as they try to turn towards you. The first half, at least of tr1, isn't that bad as you can usually find a safe spot to shoot from. But once they start shooting back, I have no idea how it's intended to be played without just trading health.

The only reason I don't rate this below mediocre is that it does retain the original for the people that enjoy it, though the framerate for the classic look is unplayable. And I did manage to get through it despite all its issues.

Reviewed on Feb 23, 2024


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