12/3/2023 0 Comments Tombraider anniversary![]() ![]() If you're really stuck, a journal apparently gives you a few hints, but we never felt compelled to use it, which is a good sign. Anniversary strips out the handholding nonsense, save for the odd subtle grapple icon that pops up when you're in range of a hook to fire at, and thanks to an array of huge, non-linear levels, you're forced to play the game properly: like an explorer looking for tell-tale environmental features. For whereas Legends held your hand almost throughout, there was rarely a sense of delighted discovery or satisfying realisation, because the game's routinely linear design and incessant prompting always left little doubt what to do next. A lot of people moaned at us last year for 'only' giving Legends a 7, but playing Anniversary, that score seems more relevant than ever. With such a sound platform to build the game upon, the only thing between you and making progress are the levels themselves, and almost for the entirety of the game, they're some of the most wonderful examples of platform puzzling you'll ever come across. ![]() It's as if Eidos and Crystal took a look at the long list of perennial bugbears anyone had about the game and scrubbed them off with a big red marker until every one was gone. Another godsend is the game's tendency to checkpoint after every single significant chunk of progress, meaning that no longer do you have the pad hurling annoyance of having to traverse large sections to get to the one thing that's barring your progress. Not only that, the fact that the game automatically grabs onto a ledge when you slip off the edge saves you from untold amounts of unnecessary frustration, as does the ability to balance or do a 'safety grab' when necessary. While most of the basic geometry is admittedly very similar, the way Crystal Dynamics has shaped the game design to take advantage of the enhanced control and move set used in Legends turns it into a very different, and far more enjoyable game.įor example, seemingly minor additions like the ability to grapple objects and yank them down, or fire your grapple at a ceiling-mounted hook and wall run along changes your whole approach to getting around and solving puzzles. In truth, though, it's really only the shell that's the same. Large chunks of entire levels are exactly how you remember them - or at least how you think you remember them. When you first trudge through the desolate temples in the Peru levels, you'd be forgiven for assuming that it's little more than a delightful graphical makeover. Fortunately, Anniversary does the job remarkably well, and as good as we could have possibly hoped, in truth. Like many of the cutting edge 3D games of the mid 90s, it's a humbling and harrowing experience to fire them up now, and only a respectful remake could hope to preserve the memory of what such iconic games stood for. That said, if you were to go back and play the original now, you'd be appalled at how clunky the control and camera system feels, how evil the checkpointing was (unless you played the 'save anywhere' PC version), and, eek, how badly the visuals have aged. What made it so special was, to put it bluntly, fantastic (and hugely memorable) level design, allied to the fact that it was one of the very first games to fully realise the potential of 3D gameplay. Pixels bigger than your face Discussions with the natives over the new bypass route weren't going as planned. ![]() But it's also a 'celebratory remake', and one that manages to improve on almost every aspect of the original by rebuilding the game from the ground up without taking anything away from what made it so special in the beginning. It feels like its own game again despite 'only' being a remake of the celebrated 1996 original. It's back to palm sweating platform puzzling on an extraordinary scale, with feisty combat elements put well and truly into the background to add tension and drama only when required. By re-energising and revitalising what people loved about Tomb Raider in the first place, Anniversary is, in all respects, the best Lara Croft adventure to date. All it needed, you felt, was to get back to basics - back to the sort of fiendish design vision that made the series such a phenomenon when it burst onto the scene in 1996.Īnd so it has proved. But last year's polished but undemanding Legends was certainly a promising step in the right direction. For the large part of the past decade it seemed like the interminable wait for some kind of return to 'form' was never going to happen. It's just as well Tomb Raider fans are a patient bunch. ![]()
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