The second collection of remastered Tomb Raider games does an admirable job of updating three divisive games.
It may be lost to time, but it’s been known that Tomb Raiders 1-3 get progressively better with each iteration, while Tomb Raiders 4-6 get progressively worse. Is anyone really searching for this games? No, probably not. But with the success of the first collection it’s inevitable that there would be a novelty, a curiosity, of playing these games again.
Just like the previous collection, the new visuals really look great. The developers did a solid job in interpreting the look and feel of Tomb Raider and everything definitely looks good, even by modern game standards — not just as something that’s been remastered. The ability to flip between visual styles is as neat as in the first collection, but like that first collection the modern is too dark, so I found myself flipping back and forth often depending on the environment so that I could see everything and make my way through the levels.
I don’t LOVE the user interface, unfortunately. It’s fine, but it really tries to look and feel like games in the late 90s/early 2000s and I don’t think we necessarily need to do that with menus any more. I get it, but nah, just make it clean and usable.
The controls continue to offer the choice between classic tank and something more modern. The tank controls were okay in 1999 when The Last Revelation (Tomb Raider 4) first released but they’re not fun now. And so I find myself using the modern controls most of the time; they aren’t fully modern because that would break the design of the games, but they do feel like they’re still nostalgia based and they mostly work. It’s a neat take (just remember that we need to use momentum to get anywhere, which can be a bit tough to grasp at first).
Tomb Raider IV is the best game here, putting Lara Croft in one locale and forcing her to explore and survive a giant pyramid. The other two are highly missable. The collection feels like the “end” of the original Tomb Raider saga, when developers were throwing things at a wall in hopes of finding something to stick. Hint: not much does. The first three games? Sure. They’re fun and they hold up. These latest three? They’re just kind of there, getting away from what Tomb Raider was with each successive entry. This collection is fine if we’re really itching to play more Tomb Raider, but because the games themselves aren’t very good it’s not anything more than a novelty.
This review is based on a Steam code sent to SideQuesting by the publisher. It originally appeared on The SideQuest Live for February 17, 2025. Images and video courtesy publisher.
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