Back to the Beginning
Lara's re-imagined origin goes portable and stays remarkably true to the console versions.
Published: August 25, 2007
Oh, for folks that were hopelessly addicted to the original, the wholly unique feeling of nostalgic familiarity and minty freshness to the gameplay will undoubtedly provide a kind of bittersweet revival of the franchise, mainly because the core pieces of the original game's, well, tomb raiding aspect is at the fore. Yes, updates were made (both to the original game and even to the bits introduced in Legend), but this is a game that recalls the same she-Indiana Jones vibe of the first game, forgoing human enemies for time-forgotten creepy crawlies and for the most part it works very well indeed. You'll still find some light physics-based puzzles and tons of parkour-influenced acrobats, but the pull here is just in uncovering locales long forgotten by time and human hands.
Luckily, like Indy's adventures, the long-forgotten traps of old are still very much in place; pressure plates abound, and in one instance a rolling ball of doom makes an appearance, but where Crystal Dynamics first explored the idea of freeing Lara from the clunky grid-based movement system of the original game, the fundamentals have been bolstered by the addition of the iconic heroine being able to jump out onto and teeter on impossibly small resting points that ninjas would think twice about. With the new combat system that revolves around shooting the various animals in the game until they're pissed enough to charge while she slo-mo dives and nails a headshot (provided you can shoot fast enough when the crosshairs line up, mind you), Lara feels even more like an adventurous superheroine.
Unfortunately, for all of the nostalgic rushes I felt as I plugged through the game, I found myself stumped more than a few times as I thought through some of the more elaborate puzzles. Unlike Legend, which what about as clear cut as it could have been, the combination of textures and camera sometimes made it seemingly impossible to move on without a random leap of faith. I can't recall if Legend ever made use of jumps off a wall when swinging along them, but the first time it's introduced in St. Francis Folly, there's really no indication that that's what was needed to progress.
Coupled with a camera that made what should have been a simple left analog stick motion to jump off the wall a trial-and-error process of falling and re-doing the same sequence over and over again, I was ready to lose it. Eventually I learned to just position the camera so that it was facing the wall I was swinging on and then make a blind leap toward the camera. This wasn't an isolated incident, either. The camera regularly complicated jumps that should have been easy, and often the penalty was either having to re-climb an area or watching Lara plummet to her death. One of the quickest ways to get on my bad side is to make me sit through dozens of loading screens as I try and retry something over and over again.
The final sequence in the game at Natla's Mines almost made me burst a blood vessel as it combined timed jumps that had to be perfect with enemies that would spawn and hit Lara with attacks to knock her off the smallish platform. Another part earlier had me retrying a couple dozen times to make a simple jump that I eventually discovered was just the camera yet again making it look like I had the angle right when it was off. The game tries to make up for this with generous checkpoints (and they're greatly appreciated), but some of the jumps are so finicky that I was praying for PC-style quicksave/load option.
It is a crying shame because so much of Tomb Raider Anniversary was obviously done with a reverence for the original game (though almost all of it is more or less new with set pieces from the old game; there's very little in the way of straight copy/paste level design, which is fine). Even the unlockable commentary tracks in every level were enough to get me to play through a good portion of the game all over again, but frustration eventually won out. Coming from the absolute bliss that was Tomb Raider Legend, I was a little surprised to see things so janky here. I know people bitched about the difficulty, but it seems to have swung too far into cheap shot territory.
