Tomb Raider I-III Remastered Review

I have impeccable Tomb Raider credentials, having played and completed every entry in the series (even Chronicles), yet I don't remember the original games being quite this challenging. The first three Tomb Raider games – the very same ones collected in this here package – played an integral role during my teenage years (not like that), taking up a near-permanent residence in the disc tray of my PS1. Me and my mate knew the games inside out, but that was twenty-odd years ago. Tomb Raider I-III Remastered offers a golden opportunity to revisit those halcyon days, although it does prove the old adage, that you can't go home again. These are old games, and they feel old. It's nostalgia in the truest sense – pain at returning to something from the past.

Starting where it all began with 1996's original Tomb Raider, you can immediately see why it seemed so revolutionary at the time. Few games managed to muster the same kind of atmosphere that pervades Lara Croft's first outing. The moment you entered that cavernous chamber and got set upon by wolves, it became clear that developer Core Design had created something really special, and while now its polygonal textured landscape and characters may look enormously crude, back then it was a big deal. A fully realised 3D world you could freely explore, as long as you could manage to fend off the marauding wildlife using Lara's pistols, shotgun, magnums, or uzis.

Updating a game that lives so vividly in the memory, and is still a benchmark for three-dimensional adventuring, must have proved immensely difficult for remastering specialists Aspyr, but the studio has done a pretty stellar job in punching up the visuals. All three games retain their essence – Aspyr's modern high-res graphics look great, lovingly layered on top of the original, and, like the best remasters, you can flit back and forth between those shiny new graphics and the classic visuals, which have also been given a spruce up. If you can't work the old 'tank' controls anymore, there are modern controls, too, making movement and traversal much smoother. But for a game that demands precision platforming (thanks to the grid-based geometry of its environments), the modern controls can see you missing many a jump.

It's already tough enough trying to traverse Tomb Raider's vertiginous catacombs, temples, mountains and other complex terrain without the controls getting in the way, but no amount of tinkering on Aspyr's part can bring Tomb Raider I-III's climbing and combat up to date. You still unholster Lara's guns, lock on to an enemy, then hold down the trigger until it flops over dead. In the first Tomb Raider, combat encounters are relatively rare, but in Tomb Raider II the legions of Bartoli thugs come thick and fast. Just make sure you don't upset the monks when you get to the Himalayas. Tomb Raider III is similarly fraught with danger, throwing tigers at you from the off, but Lara's acrobatics enable her to flip and somersault about the place while shooting.

While Tomb Raider and its first two sequels might be showing their age, there's really no better way to revisit three ironclad classics than this. Aspyr really has done a bang-up job in updating those flickering old textures and polygons, and other modern touches, like being able to save anywhere at any time, is a welcome touch. What shines through is the quality of the level design – despite being almost thirty years old, all three games remain intricate and well-made experiences, proper rip-roaring adventures fully deserving of their place within the pantheon of video game history.

Happily, Tomb Raider I-III Remastered is a reverential treatment of that golden PS1 era, offering all three games complete with their expansions (TR I's Unfinished Business, TR II's Golden Mask and TR III's The Lost Artifact). There are issues, of course, like the modern controls failing to work in certain situations, like trying to crawl out of a crevice, or attempting to gently lower yourself down without shattering Lara's shins; and the camera frequently gets stuck or manages to obscure your view, but this is a collection presented as-is, warts and all. To have made them any other way would have been a disservice.

As hard as it is to go back and realise how much has changed since those '90s and early-2000s Tomb Raider games first launched, Tomb Raider I-III Remastered provides practically everything you could ask for, short of added bonuses like behind-the-scenes materials and such (some extras would have been nice). All three games can be enjoyed exactly as you remember them, or rediscovered with slick, modern visuals and revamped controls. This is how a well-crafted remaster that's true to the originals ought to be done.