Tomb Raider 1996 Remaster Review

This was a game I always hear about and Lara Croft's legacy can't be ignored. I did originally play the TR Survivor games and the Crystal Dynamics reboot trilogy before that but I would always hear about how good the Core Design particularly this game was. At the same time, there are your fair share of modern gamers and even retro gamers who are used to the Mario style of 3D platforming often critcizing this game. So where do I fit in?

I really like it, I can't deny if this was the original PS1 version of the game with the save crystals or the PC version without controller support, I wouldn't be able to get to the end and I can probably picture myself not liking the game even with it's hiccups, the remaster helped increase my chances of enjoying the game. I also played mostly with the original controls with some input remaps primarily putting interact and shoot to R2.

With that out of the way, I mostly had a blast if not rather exhausting time playing this particular Tomb Raider game.

I'll start with what I liked and is the platforming and level design. I'll start with the platforming, be warned, this is not your typical 3D platformer with analog control or heavily automated movement. Lara essentially moves like a tank where she has to jump to a series of sqaures and the name of the game is to judge the distance and line up your jumps to the next sqaure. Ledge grabbing isn't magnetized like in many games that come after instead you must time your jumps with the interact held down in order to grab ledges to avoid falling, this took me a while to get used to and I never fully got the hang of it even by the end but at the same time, this slow paced form of platfoming does give TR 1996 it's own unique and interesting brand of 3D platforming, it's esstentially more of a 3D transition of what cinematic 2D platformers like Prince of Persia tried to do. There isn't many games that really play like this in terms of how you interact with the ledges and how moment to moment jumps are handled.

The next positive is the level design, this is some of the best level design ever put in a game, these levels are lengthy and exhausting especially if you minimize walkthrough use, but I was already aquainted with this style, of backtracking, pulling switches, collecting keys and items and the whole, "here's a big open space, now figure out where to go as you are going through it" with other late 90s games like Resident Evil, Shadow Man, and shooters like Duke Nukem 3D and Syphon Filter to name a few and TR 1996 felt right at home for me while also having some surprises of it's own. For example the Egypt loop back twice and these are both segmented isolated levels, stuff like Duke Nukem 3D never had stuff like this. The Great Pyramid level always reminded me of how far I was from the bottom of where I started from by constantly looping back to the center with platforms placed on different sides and when I got to the top especially with how long these levels are, getting there felt pretty satisfying. If you love good level design with barely any waypoints and guides, then this game is a must play. The only issue I have with the levels is that towards the end, the game did have a lot of out of nowhere traps that can insta kill you, but this remedied by the remaster's save system.

Now I only have two major issues with the game and these could be deal breakers for some but the first I have is the lack of story. I don't really care for story in games as much as others but TR 1996's plot and characters are so paper thin that I almost with there was more actual context to what was even going on, who are the villains Lara fights' why is there a dude with a skateboard with SMGs? What was Lara's backstory and her plight? For a character that is so famous arguably more so than the games themselves, you know so little about Lara in her debut appreance, definately a strong case of first installment weirdness. That and there is so much gameplay and so little story while charming, it can sort start to feel empty with the lack of overall context to what I'm doing. This might be a positive to someone else with all that said.

The next issue and this one bugs me is the combat, while I get what the devs were trying to do, this isn't a full on TPS, combat is supposed to keep the player on his toes when doing the moment puzzle solving and platforming and it's supposed to provide some degree of tension, the combat just feels awful, and also makes me glad for the saving anywhere in the remaster. Lara can't strafe and most fights involve jumping around so the enemies can never hit you but the controls to do the sommersaults don't feel as quick and useful in the moment as they should. The auto aim doesn't feel that reliable and locks on to dead enemies too on top of the double tapping the d pad while weapons undrawn is where Lara will turn like a tank or actually jump. I never felt like I was decent at it.

Overall, Tomb Raider 1996 is a very good game depending on what you are getting into. If you are used to more traditional mascot platformers or games with heavy amounts of automated platforming, you might not like this game, but if you are open enough this might be a game you might come to like.