Lara Croft Tomb Raider: Anniversary

Relive the daring adventures of an explorer in this remake of the famous 1996's adventure.

Lara Croft is an adventurer and explorer who tries to solve mysterious ancient legends. She has an affinity with ancient history and is an experienced spelunker just like her father. Together with her father she tried to solve the unknown myth of the Scion – the legend says that only when all Scion fragments are brought together will its true power be understood. Together they were determined to solve this riddle, but sadly her father went away before they had found all the pieces.
Years later Lara decided to continue the search for the lost Scion fragments, but it seems other interested parties are getting involved. Lara must now quickly find the missing pieces before someone else lays hands on them.

Tomb Raider: Anniversary is a remake of the first Tomb Raider game originally released for PlayStation, Sega Saturn and PC back in 1996. The game is in its core a platform game that has some action elements in it.
You play as Lara Croft and you set out on a mission to find the ancient Scion treasure. The leads takes Lara to Peru, and an old Incan underground complex. The expedition quickly turns into a struggle to survive, and she will need to use all her knowledge to get out in one piece. Through the game you'll learn that Lara is no stranger to mysteries and ancient lore.

Lara is a nimble spelunker and she's equipped with dual pistols, a grappling hook and a journal. During the course of the game you'll find more items to use, but this is basically what you will be working with. The environments you must traverse require dangerous jumps, climbing at dizzy heights, doing impossible stunts, underwater swimming, and avoiding many deadly traps.

Playing as Lara is a nice experience – the controls are mostly very responsive and making cinematic jumps is easier than it looks on screen. Even if you start the game right away, skipping the tutorial level called Lara's Mansion, you'll be informed on how to perform all the required moves to get your way around the various obstacles when you need it. This is a nice approach, because prolonged tutorials can really be painful. The Lara's Mansion level is quite tedious, but it is also a nice opportunity to practice moves and stunts.

There are some problems with the controls though. When clinging on to a wall, you often need to make a backwards jump. The problem is that you can't turn the camera back, so most of the time you must take a risk and jump outwards from the wall without being able to aim where you're going. What's more, it seems that Lara ignores some ledges – which can and certainly will lead to many unnecessary deaths. The combat system also has its problems. Lara can get into the momentum of a combat and so utilize something called the adrenaline dodge, but the way you're supposed to perform it is quite illogical and strange.
Another move that Lara can do is the wall run. This is done by attaching the grappling hook onto special hooks. This can only be done in specific locations though, but when done right, it allows Lara to run along the wall while she is hanging in the rope. Trying to jump off from this is very awkward, and often results in very random jumps – this is very weird because this is the only move in the game that seriously feels and looks broken.

The enemy AI is also strange. If you jump up on a ledge during a combat (which is quite a natural thing to do in a threatening situation – getting onto higher ground is a defensive move that gives many benefits) the AI just stops working properly. Either they will just freeze and wait for you to come down (or shoot them down), or they will blindly run around below you while you take them out with your guns. It just seems that the developers didn't include support for the AI to attack someone that is on higher ground, even if you are well within their reach. This bug can be used to your advantage in many fights and basically ruins the illusion of you fighting against living breathing creatures that dwell in the ruins.

During cut scenes and boss fights, you'll sometimes be prompted to quickly push a specific button – if you react too slowly to this, the cut scene usually ends in that Lara dies. So you need to keep your focus on the game even during the cut scenes.
Like many other platform games some parts are incredibly annoying because you must do them again and again. This game also includes some back tracking from time to time. Sometimes enemies have spawned on the way back – even when there is no logical or natural way that those could have gotten there.

Between levels you'll be treated with story cut scenes. These will take you through the story as you make progress and as if you were watching a Hollywood action movie. To get things moving they apparently have fast forwarded and skipped to the important parts, which can feel like the story has some plot holes and leaves some questions unanswered. But if you don't think about it and instead focus on the game they work okay.

The game will take you though various ruins, temples, tombs, labyrinths, abysses, palaces and caves. There is a lot to discover and explore and the game does a great job in capturing the feeling of these abandoned or remote environments. When you're deep underground, you'll only hear your own footsteps and occasionally some distant sounds echoing through the empty hollows. The game has some neat effects like this that deepens the feeling of presence. The sound is thus very fitting and works great.

Graphically the game is also very pleasing – Lara has some astonishing acrobatic moves and seeing her use these skills to ascend treacherous cliffs or whatever it may be is exciting. The animations are well done too, even if there are some jerky motions here and there. The lighting is a little bit too standard though. One would have expected an underground cave with no real sources of light to be a bit darker. As it appears now, it's far too bight and clear. Overall the game is strong visually with various shader effects and the level design looks cool most of the time although it can feel quite linear.

The save/load function has its own quirks in Tomb Raider: Anniversary. Certain locations spread across the levels will save your progress at specific checkpoints. You can save whenever you want, but the save will not count as a save per se. Instead it just saves what your last checkpoint was, and if you load that save you'll be taken to that checkpoint. This is confusing at first, but works actually really good – it prevents players from squirming through the game by saving and loading the whole time. Every time you load a save, you'll be granted a full health bar too, so health packs aren't needed as much as usual.

Tomb Raider has always had puzzles and riddles to be solved. Pressure plates, boxes that must be moved around to reach new areas, keys that must be found, locked doors and hidden treasures. This game is no exception. Most of these puzzles have an appropriate difficulty level – not too easy, not too hard which is an impressing feat in itself.
Even though this is a remake of sorts it has lots of new features comparing to the previous version and the locations don't look quite the same. In other words; even if you know the previous game by heart, there will still be lots for you to discover in here.
It's nice to see a Tomb Raider game with good controls. Even if there are some blunders even in this one, it still works really well overall. Tomb Raider makes a brave attempt at combining action elements into a platform game. The result is actually cool, but some bugs need to be fixed and some more variety is needed before its true potential can shine through.

Written by Mattias - 2008-12-22

Platform: PC/WIN/DOS
Also on: PSP, PS2, Wii, 360, OS X
Developed by: Crystal Dynamics
Published by: Eidos Interactive
Genre: Platformer
Players: 1

Related titles: Tomb Raider, Tomb Raider 2, Tomb Raider 3, Tomb Raider Chronicles

Released in EU: 2007-06-01
Released in US: 2007-06-05
Released in JP: 2008-03-27

Website: Click here

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