The remaster is fine. It's the first three tomb raider games bundled together in one easy to navigate and use package. So why am I giving this such a low rating, then? The EULA. I recommend you read it. Two things stood out. They reserve the right to own and sell any mods made by fans and they can terminate the agreement without any warning including taking away our right to play the game. Buying this game means you don't own it. So I suggest pirating it. Since you don't own it when you buy it, pirating it isn't stealing it.

I loved getting back to this.

My opinion hasn't changed much regarding what I like or dislike about each entry, except maybe for the third game who feels undercooked in some parts.

But I did have a good time

For The French - https://lacritiquedumoment.wordpress.com/2024/04/18/tomb-raider-iiiiii-remastered/

I'm one of those freaks that never stopped playing (and replaying) the original Tomb Raider games, so I have a very strong familiarity with this series and these three games in particular. So a lot of the typical barriers to entry that these games present to newer fans, and maybe even older fans (the controls, the camera, the grid system etc.) weren't really an issue. I do still recognise that these remasters are probably a hard sell in 2024 and I've read plenty of reviews that support that. Personally though, these remasters delivered exactly what I expected and was hoping for.

Not to speculate but it feels like the devs were given no time at all to get these remasters made. My guess is that they were maybe given a year? We have the updated graphics sure but everything else (aside from the new control scheme) remains untouched. The in-game cutscene use the exact same head- bobby animations from the original when it would have been beneficial to clean those up a bit. The voice acting is the same, the music is the same, there's no extras to speak of... TRIII also chugs quite a bit which supports my theory that these might have been rushed. The FMVs drop frames like crazy, even when they're compressed which is wild to me.

Like, as a piece of video game history/ preservation I think these games are the gold standard for how older games should be made available for modern audiences. But I can't help but wish there was been a way to tighten up the newer versions while leaving the original games as they were, jank and all.

It's insane that they chose to remaster the graphics the way they did, basically just pasting new textures over what was already there. I love this decision even though it doesn't always work from a readability stand point. I'd prefer that the game take a big swing with the art direction and make a mad choice like this then have the games lose their charm striving to match modern graphical sensibilities. Lara's character model is also the best it's ever looked.

The photo mode has the potential to break the game altogether!? The camera isn't tethered to Lara so you can just straight up map out the whole level if you feel like it and get a sense of what lies ahead. Again, a crazy decision that I 100% support. These games are hard!! It's good to give players a useful tool like that. I don't know if that was the intended goal for the camera but regardless, I hope they never patch it.

I really enjoyed revisiting TR I, II and III in this way. I hope that some new fans can get some enjoyment out of them too. I hope we'll get The Last Revelations and Chronicles eventually but maybe that's asking for too much.

From the view point of a collection basis the Remastered Collection is an excellent way to experiance the original Tomb Raider games. There isn't much in the form of extra's but honestly that's okay. The redone graphics are great and being able to swap from the original and new styles is a really great choice and I found myself switching constantly. The new graphics could use some tweaks in the lighting department though. Sometimes I found it too dark. Modern controls were added but the original controls still work better honestly but if it gets some people to play then thats great. The collection makes the games feel fresh all the while really there's not much changed in the core games. A solid deal all things considered.

Tomb Raider 1:
Couldn't earn the game completion trophy due to a power outage which corrupted my save (ON THE LAST LEVEL TOO), and I couldn't be bothered to play everything all over again so I cheated to get back to the last level. It really dampened my feeling of accomplishment. But that aside, I had a blast with this! It was so fun to replay this classic with a new coat of paint. It was lovely. Honestly big recommendation from me already. Excited to go to 2 now. I played these games all the time with my mom as a kid so this rerelease in general feels really special to me.
[Will update after beating 2 and 3]

It's been lovingly remastered and rebuilt in an entirely new engine. The visuals are gorgeous and it keeps all the extra content (even finishing some for TR3 that never came out).

Modern controls are ass tho. Back or slide flipping are limited to the guns being out and it just doesn't work. The free camera also breaks endlessly to the point where it's impossible to see.

I'd also say that the remastered visuals make some pickups almost impossible to see.

Other than that, pretty damn good.

como alguém que jogou os mesmos na era do playstation 1, venho dizer que esses remasters estão impecáveis! dá até uma sensação breve de novidade por ver tudo igual mas ao mesmo diferente e bonito.

é visível o quanto tudo foi feito com muito carinho pela aspyr e isso se tornou raro nos jogos de hoje... isso me deixa encantada e com certeza continuarei jogando!!!

as legendas em pt-br te deixam por dentro da história, coisa que eu não conseguia entender quando criança apenas ouvindo os personagens falando inglês.

além dos três jogos clássicos estarem lindos, a adição das DLC's é o que completa a obra, já que muitos não puderam jogar na época, assim como eu.

vale a pena testar quem nunca jogou 💕

I enjoyed the first and second games well enough, but that third game really soured my experience.

This collection definitely shows the cracks that happen from an annual development crunch. Very few things to really make the games feel fresh, but they do feel distinct.

As it stands I liked each game significantly less than the last one.

Now that the embargo is over, I can finally review this remaster!

Although I am far from finished due to work, I did play the original ones, including Unfinished Business, so I am here to comment on what the remake has brought us.

Other than enhanced HD textures and remade models (Lara looks amazing!), the CGI cinematics are upscalled, and the sound has been enhanced as well (both music, SFX and dialogues). The items are now 3D instead of 2D textures, we have achievements (some are funny, some are easter eggs that people who played the originals will understand - like getting that Large Medkit through the corner glitch).

The tank controls remain as an option, thankfully, because the modern controls are buggy (Lara doesn't backflip, for example). The classic visuals are also an option, if you press F3 you can switch between them and the modern visuals. The essence of the classic Tomb Raider games is fully here, it's like reliving memories but with higher quality!

I experienced a few texture bugs (especially places with the ceiling missing), and had friends that experienced progression bugs too, which I hope they get fixed now during launch.

Overall, it's an amazing remastered trilogy that comes with the add-on levels! My favorite of these three will always be Tomb Raider II, of course!

Special thanks to Crystal Dynamics for the early access and free key! Thank you for this oportunity to try out the game so we could report the bugs to be fixed!

Una preciosa experiencia para recordar la necesidad de volver a los clásicos. Porque los clásicos son inmortales y la figura de Lara Croft permanecerá por siempre en el imaginario colectivo de los videojuegos. Pero la realidad hoy en día es que ni con un intento tosco de controles modernos ni con una capa de pintura (literal esto, es loable, pero es lo que es) se consigue despegar la trilogía inicial de TR de lo que es: un producto de su época. En concreto de los 90. Es tremendo lo que consiguieron hacer con las capacidades técnicas de aquella. También se entienden bien los ciclos de desarrollo y de costes al ver cómo están hechos y planteados.
Es un producto interesante y una experiencia a la que hay que acercarse al menos una vez en la vida para entender lo que Tomb Raider dejó de legado, pero ya está. Es una colección importante y necesaria, pero ya está. La serie Legend cambió demasiado el estilo de juego y la serie Survivor convirtió a Lara Croft en otro personaje.

Quizá necesitemos ver a esta Lara de nuevo en acción en un juego nuevo, pero si es así, ojalá sea reflejando lo mejor que tenían estos juegos (los rompecabezas, el plataformeo, los secretos, la ambientación y el SILENCIO de la exploración) y aprendiendo de lo que ha funcionado y lo que no por el camino.

Boggles the mind how people can play FromSoftware games and be like "Oh these games are amazing, they don't hold your hand or tell you where to go and they're incredibly hard to master but so rewarding when you do" then they play OG Tomb Raider and just instantly assume it's shit because the controls are hard to get used to.

Maybe it's because platforming in AAA games has been dumbed down to an insulting degree or maybe it's because modern Tomb Raider is more action focused, but these games have always been primarily exploration, puzzle and platforming games with a specific control set designed for that, not action games with shit controls.

If you're new to this trilogy then please, take your time to get to grips with it and you'll experience some absolute masterclasses in level design and atmosphere.

What an absolutely beautiful remaster so clearly made by people full of love for the source material. Tomb Raider fans spent well over a decade begging for this to happen and it's far better than I could have ever imagined. Fingers crossed for The Last Revelation, Chronicles and Angel of Darkness next, then even Legend, Anniversary and Underworld.

Lara Croft is back, baby!

I'm genuinely starting to think that nostalgia might actually be a mental disorder. I can't fathom the high ratings on this. And for some reason it's much higher than the individual games. At their time they were ok, though I never got into it much aside from playing through the demo on PC. But by todays standards, this is just unadulterated jank. It quickly becomes a chore with its unfathomably poor camera that seems to intentionally work against you. When firing at enemies the camera often looks at you rather than your target, in small spaces it flips around and messes up your controls. A really bad example of this is in the first TR2 map. As you walk into a room, two boulders come after you, and without pausing the action the camera goes to them. The issue being that as that happens, it also reverts your controls so you end up running towards them. Then it suddenly switches to a view in front of you, so if you're holding forward, you're running right into them. With tank controls it works, but aside of resident evil, I just can't use them. Especially for an acrobatic game like this. It's just so stiff and slow that everything is a chore. I can't believe no one in the making of this thought to put modern controls to analogue and tank to digital, or have the one unused controller button be a switch between them.

Then there's the button delay. I ended the first game with over 600 saves. All thanks to half my jumps not registering and I ended up saving for pretty much every single jump.

As far as the combat goes, it's as bad as anything else. Enemy ai is simply enemies moving towards you and balling up all around you as the camera spins around trying to track one. Though with more than one you can't even tell who. This is another thing that probably works better on tank controls as you can move backwards and shoot, but then again you lose the ability to run circles around certain enemies and shoot them in the side as they try to turn towards you. The first half, at least of tr1, isn't that bad as you can usually find a safe spot to shoot from. But once they start shooting back, I have no idea how it's intended to be played without just trading health.

The only reason I don't rate this below mediocre is that it does retain the original for the people that enjoy it, though the framerate for the classic look is unplayable. And I did manage to get through it despite all its issues.

A fun nostalgia trip and also a reminder that you can never really go home again.

To start, as a remaster this is pretty good but also kind of basic and has some notable flaws. The graphics upgrades are nice: it looks "retro" while also being much easier on the eyes than the original graphics. It's kind of a "looks how you remember instead of how it actually looked" kind of thing. I do also appreciate that the original graphics are a button press away, if only as a reminder that those blocky tiles that looked great on a 17" CRT really don't cut it on a 55" OLED. The original graphics would probably look better if they'd let them run at 60 FPS, but they don't for some reason, and even for 30FPS they feel jittier or jerkier than they should.

The modern controls, which have prompted much discussion since release, were a nice idea but are bad in practice. Fundamentally, the early TR games are precision platformers with many puzzles built around the nuances of the tank controls, and if you can't set up your jumps exactly you're gonna get frustrated. The modern controls can still do most of the maneuvers you'd need to do (hop back, back flip, and so on), but they were all flakey for me and trickier to execute than with the tank controls. I still don't think there's a way to side-step. Even if you do end up preferring the modern controls, there's no official explanation of how they work AFAICT, and they work kind of weird in some ways. E.g. separating "interact with item" (action) from "fire weapon" (labeled "secondary" in the menu) makes some sense, but if you're separating those why would you put "grab" on secondary? I'm no fan of tank controls, and it took me a little while to get used to them again, but ultimately I think in this case the original tank controls are more effective and less frustrating than this clumsy attempt at modernization.

The modern graphics do also have a few issues. Mostly legibility: there were several cases where the new sprites for keys you need to pickup were very difficult to see against the tiles they sat on, with very low contrast and the keys themselves being smaller than the original. Unless you remember where all the key items are or are using a walkthrough, I think it's easy to miss an item and get a bit lost some places. The lighting can also be a bit weird: areas in TR2 that were pitch black to encourage use of flares are merely "dim" now, which isn't a huge deal but does change how you play the game and make flares even less necessary. I also hit a weird bug at the end of TR2 where I couldn't grab the dagger out of the dragon's heart on modern graphics, but it worked the first time I tried when I switched to original graphics.

So it's nice, but most of the pitch here is just making these classic games convenient to access on modern platforms.

As for revisiting the games themselves, I enjoyed the trip down memory lane, but I also am reminded that early works in developing mediums/genres/etc. often have some very rough edges and I think that applies here. I am often a little cranky at how homogeneous modern high-budget games can seem, and it's nice to go back to an era when patterns hadn't been as firmly established and things were a little more zany (Lara never fought any dinosaurs in the survivor trilogy, and I kind of miss how acrobatic her movement was in these early games), but on the other hand some of the puzzles are frustratingly obtuse and when combat is challenging it's more because of the clunky controls than good game design. I originally played TR1 when it came out on a PlayStation, meaning there were save crystals, and only a child with effectively unlimited free time could have the patience to get through TR1 with save crystals (and before widespread Internet access made walkthroughs easy to get! I might have had the Prima guide at the time, I can't remember). Nowadays I'm grateful for save scumming and the ability to quickly look up a solution when I'm stuck.

Even with those complaints, there's still a lot to like in these games! As early action-adventure games they're rough around the edges, but they also have a lot of really fun sequences and do a great job of setting up atmosphere within the limits of the technology they had. And my complaints above about obtuse puzzles mostly apply to TR1: TR2 is a much more confidently made game with better level design. Lara Croft is an iconic character who's carried some rough baggage over the years, between being a poster-child for video game culture's toxic objectification of women and then being demoted from "stone-cold uber-competent treasure hunter" to "traumatized grad student" in the survivor trilogy; it's nice to have her early games back with some modern polish.

All of which leaves me glad I dipped back into these games to remind me of my childhood, and also keenly aware that I am no longer that child.