sharks + planes as formerly seen on Twitter

There's just something about it that holds up forever, I dunno. a combination of massive intricate levels and tank-controlled exploration just makes the world seem so solid and physical. Lara's climbing toolset is just perfect and endlessly replayable. Every game in the classic series (except for 5, kinda) felt very fresh and different in tone. Just the addition of a couple new maneuvers each game had huge ramifications for the complexity of level design, but still felt totally natural to the game before it

These are some of the most satisfying retro games ever to not only complete but gain mastery of and I wish I could get more people to believe me, haha. I've seen a lot of pushback recently like "Tomb Raider was never good people just wanted triangle tits" or w/e and that's just wrong, sorry. It also had to be a good game, and it was wildly innovative and influential, even before Lara was a media icon or something.

anyway,

I came out of the announcement of these remasters like "well at least you can disable the new visuals so it's a proper modern console/PC port of Tomb Raider," but it's starting to look like just the perfect amount of faithfulness vs. QoL and improvements. Legitimately the new way to play this

• Standardizing the classic TR moveset across all three games. Midair/underwater rolling in TR1 and sprinting-into-crouch rolls and crouching rollouts in TR3. TR1 jumps no longer rely on specific frames of Lara's run cycle
• Unlimited save anywhere in all three games
• Proper per-level stat tracking in all three games

Excellent. Outstanding

To many, Tomb Raider is the best that ever were when it came to the genre during that generation, and for as many reinventions as it’s been through since then, there’s a magic to her original run that has yet to be matched. Aspyr, a part of Embracer, an umbrella of companies that’s been tearing through the gaming industry as of late thanks to bad business decisions, has certainly had a good one in remastering Tomb Raider I to III at the very least.

Review by Eduardo Reboucas