I'm one of those freaks that never stopped playing (and replaying) the original Tomb Raider games, so I have a very strong familiarity with this series and these three games in particular. So a lot of the typical barriers to entry that these games present to newer fans, and maybe even older fans (the controls, the camera, the grid system etc.) weren't really an issue. I do still recognise that these remasters are probably a hard sell in 2024 and I've read plenty of reviews that support that. Personally though, these remasters delivered exactly what I expected and was hoping for.

Not to speculate but it feels like the devs were given no time at all to get these remasters made. My guess is that they were maybe given a year? We have the updated graphics sure but everything else (aside from the new control scheme) remains untouched. The in-game cutscene use the exact same head- bobby animations from the original when it would have been beneficial to clean those up a bit. The voice acting is the same, the music is the same, there's no extras to speak of... TRIII also chugs quite a bit which supports my theory that these might have been rushed. The FMVs drop frames like crazy, even when they're compressed which is wild to me.

Like, as a piece of video game history/ preservation I think these games are the gold standard for how older games should be made available for modern audiences. But I can't help but wish there was been a way to tighten up the newer versions while leaving the original games as they were, jank and all.

It's insane that they chose to remaster the graphics the way they did, basically just pasting new textures over what was already there. I love this decision even though it doesn't always work from a readability stand point. I'd prefer that the game take a big swing with the art direction and make a mad choice like this then have the games lose their charm striving to match modern graphical sensibilities. Lara's character model is also the best it's ever looked.

The photo mode has the potential to break the game altogether!? The camera isn't tethered to Lara so you can just straight up map out the whole level if you feel like it and get a sense of what lies ahead. Again, a crazy decision that I 100% support. These games are hard!! It's good to give players a useful tool like that. I don't know if that was the intended goal for the camera but regardless, I hope they never patch it.

I really enjoyed revisiting TR I, II and III in this way. I hope that some new fans can get some enjoyment out of them too. I hope we'll get The Last Revelations and Chronicles eventually but maybe that's asking for too much.

TRIII was my favourite of the original games back in the day and now, having played through all three of these in succession I think it still is my favourite, even if I think TRI is the superior game overall. TRIII remains as frustrating and obtuse as ever ( I relied on guides more for this game than either of the other two) and while the level design is more ambitious then it has ever been up to this point, I think the devs hadn't quite figured out how to make non-linearity work in a TR game yet.

Still, I LOVE the atmosphere in III. The sound design especially does a lot to make this game extra spooky. I love that the games have steadily introduced more horror- elements as they went on. III especially feels very influenced by the X-Files and of course there's the final 3 hours and change that's spent basically running around the set of The Thing. It's brilliant!

To speak exclusively about the remaster for a second, the modern graphics do this particular game a disservice the way they didn't for the other two. TRIII has such wonderfully weird and spooky lighting design and there was no effort to recreate it here. It's not a problem in every area; most outdoor sections still look very nice. But once Lara is indoors everything just looks so flat. London was my favourite section in the original game because of it's use of purple and green lighting where it shouldn't exist. It really enhances this game's lean towards outright horror and it's just gone now.

The racist portrayals of certain cultures were inexcusable when this game first came out but the remaster really pulls all that stuff into very sharp focus. It stick out so much and makes some sections of the game fairly unpleasant. I don't really know how Aspyr could have gotten around this, short of not remastering III at all. It's baked in to the game's DNA and it's rubbish.

Lara is very fun in this game even though she's at her most murderous. There's more cutscenes than ever and she gets a lot of good banter. And I like that she's kind of a dope in this game too.

I guess my final word on this whole game is that it's a mixed bag that I have a lot of nostalgic attachment to. I'm happy to have finally played it from beginning to end and I hope to revisit it again as the years goes on.

As a direct follow up to the original, Tomb Raider II pivots so hard into action and gunplay that it's borderline absurd. The game suffers for it too. The sense of isolation and low-key spooky vibes are just completely stripped away when Lara has to stop to mow down 5 guys every 5 minutes or so. The combat of the original game was not tweaked to compensate for the increased enemy count so most encounters are just frustrating and serve to artificially inflate the difficulty.

The sense of scale is lost too. Environments feel way more cramped. This works quite well in levels like The Wreck of the Maria Doria but not quite so well in locations like Tibet and China. The emphasis on traps is something I'm not too fond of either. And the vehicle sections should really have been cut altogether. But I understand that you had escalate the gameplay somehow.

The story is also way more bland this time around. Marco Bartolli isn't as fun or memorable as Natla and Lara doesn't really interact with him at all. His transformation into a dragon at the end is pretty cool at least and I do like that his remaining men terrorise Lara's home in revenge after his death. Its a novel way to end the whole thing.

Other positives! The music still slaps. Lara's in game model looks so much better. She actually has her plait this time around which is very important. Traversal and platforming is as fun as ever. The art direction (in the original version of the game specifically) is super ambitious and, for the most part, looks lovely. I love Judith Gibbins as Lara. She's always been my favourite. She has the perfect dispassionate, aristocratic tone which suits Lara's new blood thirsty personality very well! And I'm a sucker for a costume change so I'm glad Lara gets a few of those.

Yeah, it's alright. I'm sad that the game leans so much into action and loses a lot of what made the original so special. But I appreciate some of the bigger swings with the level design and locations. Fuck those vehicle sections though, goddamm...

I'll have some more concrete thoughts on the remasters as a whole once I've completed all three but I have some stray thoughts on them each individually.

Tomb Raider (1996) is my least played of the original Core games. It came out first when I was too young to even know about it and by the time I considered myself a die-hard fan of the series and tracked down a copy, the games had progressed to the point where I found the first one quite boring and plain by comparison. Giving it a proper go now, I can see why it immediately became a smash hit.

The sense of scale and isolation in this game is unmatched. The majority of the game is just Lara, alone and exploring these grand locations. Egypt in particular has some really jaw dropping moments where Lara feels tiny and insignificant in the presence of ancient history. It really is something special and the subsequent games never really reached those same heights. There's combat sure, but it's definitely a secondary component; the sections of the games where you have to fight enemies feel well thought out. The devs knew that the real strength of this game was the traversal and the combat sections are fun little interludes to mix things up a bit. It's wild that Tomb Raider 2 would lean so heavily into combat to the point of absurdity.

I unironically love the threadbare plot and characters. The story is not this games focus but it serves as a decent framework to tie all these locations together. But the FMV cutscenes are still pretty exciting! I love Natla's inexplicable Texan accent and the fact that she has not one but two rootin' tootin' cowboy types serving as her personal henchmen. It's gas.

I really like Shelly Blond's performance as Lara. She gives Lara a charming and good natured personality, one we'd never get with her in these games again. Notably in this game too, every human enemy Lara kills is in self defence... an interesting thing to keep in mind as the series moves forward.

And the music! You go through so much of the game with nothing but ambient noise. Maybe you've been struggling to figure out what to do next or are stuck on a particulary hard section... and then those little musical cues kick-in to let you know you're on the right track and the dopamine hits real good.

Ah look I could go on but I'm not very good at keeping all my thoughts cohesive. My main take away is that this game really is an early 3D masterpiece. I'm glad it's available on modern hardware, warts and all, for more people to enjoy.

Objectively, I know it's the worst PS1 Tomb Raider. But I have a big ol' soft spot for it. 10 year old me was distraught at the idea of Lara being dead so I was just happy to go on more adventures with her. The episodic structure is very reminiscent of III, which was and still is my favourite. It was also the first Tomb Raider that I managed to finish by myself (with extensive use of guides of course).

For a game that Core seemed to actively resent working on I think it could have turned out a lot worse. There's a lot of variety to the level design and it's the best that one of these games has ever looked. The engine is really showing its age by this point but its pushed to its techincal limit here. The idea of Lara's friends reminiscing about her life is fun but let down by the quality of the writing and some really baffling continuity stuff. Still, it gives the devs an excuse to put Lara in a bunch of different scenarios and keeps the game from feeling stale.

All that being said, its rushed and buggy as all hell. The blame for that really falls on Eidos. Comissioning this game is directly responsible for Angel of Darkness being an unfinished mess and the slow death of Core Design that followed. It's difficult to uncouple this game from all the stuff that transpired after it's release and maybe things would have turned out for the better if it hadn't been made at all. We'll never know.

Mmh. I was very enthusiastic about the idea of a stripped back AC and I cant fault this game for delivering on that promise. But this was probably the wrong game to play straight after finishing BG3. The artifice of the Ubisoft open world formula is just blindlingly obvious now. Basim being tied directly to Valhalla, a game I have not played, meant that I was anticipating that any impactful moments weren't going to hit as hard. And maybe that's unfair of me but it was a huge barrier to me becoming interested in the story.

Really though, I was mostly using this to facilitate the watching of long-form YouTube videos and I have other stuff I want to get to. So I'm calling it quits. I might just have to accept that my love for Assassin's Creed is well and truly gone at this stage.

This game is very silly. But really, all the Core era games were very silly too. There's something about Legend that's just extra cringe. It must be the extremely dated mid-2000's veneer. Those character designs are firmly of their era, especially Amanda. Some concept designer's idea of their perfect edgy goth gf.

I've played this game a billion times. I can't have an objective opinion on it really. I can say with all certainty that the camera is dreadful but everything else gets a pass, no matter how flawed it all ends up being. What can I say? I'm just a Tomb Raider girly.

I love that we're firmly in the era of PSX throwback aesthetics. This game looks soooo good. The texture work is great and the weird character boiling we used to get in old games has been replicated pretty well. Total eye candy.

I wish the games writing was slightly stronger. We get introduced to a lot of interesting characters throughout but the game doesn't really do much to flesh them out. Alex's dialogue is also just on the wrong side of too quipy for my tastes. And I wouldn't have minded a few twists in the story. Still, it's a fun time! The puzzles are tricky without feeling impossible and they're all very unique and cool. Almost makes me feel like a smarty pants!

Phew! It took 2 restarts and a couple of respecs for me to really get into BG3, and dozens of hours before I really learned to love it. But I'm glad I stuck with it. It's rare you get such consistently great writing in a game of this scale and considering the amount of variables that had to be accounted for, that's a small miracle. Not everything syncs up perfectly, but it's as close as it could possibly get.

This game is so massive. I worked really hard and saved scummed like crazy to get the outcomes I wanted because I know it'll be a long time before I have the time to play it again. But I'll be excited to go back to it in a few years with fresh eyes (and after a few more patches.)

It's a big commitment, but it's well worth your time.

I first played this game when I was around Heather's age. I had to struggle to get through it. I didn't go near any types of horror media back then but something about this game just compelled me to see it through. And I'm so glad I managed. It was such an important part of my formative years and has been the one game I've never stopped thinking about for my entire life. Nothing else has captured the inherent terror of womanhood in such a viceral and unflinching way.

I love Heather. I love her rage and I feel her pain. I love her idle commentary about everything she sees around her. She's so fucking funny. As a 34 year old woman I still aspire to be as brave as her one day...

This game was a hard act to follow after 2 and I think it tends to get maligned but it's easily my favourite game of the series. And it's not even close.

Ahhh, I was obsessed with this game when I was a teenager. Coming right off the back of Legend (which I also loved) I remember tracking the release of Anniversary and being so excited for each new promo still or gameplay video that we got. I still have my collector's edition! I played it and replayed it pretty intensely for a week or so and was very satisfied. Then a few years later, Underworld came out, soured me on this trilogy and I didn't think about it again for years.

Revisiting it now its still pretty decent! The platforming is immensely satisfying when it works and the sense of scale is still very impressive. Lara's moveset feels less polished than it did in Legend somehow. The platforming is more complex yes, but I don't think her ledge detection was tweaked well enough to compensate. This isn't such a problem in the early game when things aren't too tricky. But when you get to Egypt thats when the cracks really start to show. There were a lot of jumps that I know were lined up correctly where Lara just didn't connect with the geometry the way she was supposed to. It makes some of the best designed levels a total pain in the arse. Obelisk of Khamoon and The Great Pyramid spring to mind.

The story is fun enough but Lara's character arc is kind of bananas. I suppose it's technically an improvement from the original where she didn't have an arc at all but the game can't seem to decide how to frame her transformation into a cold-blooded killer (of humans). Like, it's cool if Lara's just a terrible person like she is in the Core games, but I think her characterisation in this trilogy is just too affable and charismatic for that to work and the whole thing just doesn't gel for me.

On that note, I think Keeley Hawes will always be my favourite Lara. She's just so charming. If Crystal Dynamics decide to mature Lara back up again I would love for her to come back.

It'll be a trip going back to this game again in the OTHER remake of it that's coming out next year. I'm kind of excited to go back to a time where Lara's character was just flat as cardboard. Give me my mean, standoffish and weird British imperialist girl back ❤️💕