Back in 1996 Tomb Raider was an interesting new slant on the 3D game with an Indiana Jones-like plot and radical idea – a female main character. Eleven years later, Lara Croft has become a huge franchise, spawning games on every format and two movies starring no less than Oscar-winning actress Angelina Jolie.
Developers Crystal Dynamics were entrusted with the job of recapturing the Tomb Raider magic by publisher and parent company Eidos, after the awful Angel of Darkness, Core design’s last game, and the reason for much head-rolling and gnashing of teeth. They duly came up with Tomb Raider Legend, a game that was well-received and really did bring the ailing Lara back to her roots. The original game is still considered by many to be the best and Eidos commissioned the remake of the original to herald over a decade of Lara Croft and Tomb Raider, and even enlisted the services of Lara’s original designer, Toby Gard to help re-imagine some of gaming’s most memorable levels.
Anniversary’s story has been updated slightly, or kind of fleshed-out to make more sense of the original game’s levels. A rather flimsy plot doesn’t make much sense but somehow it doesn’t matter. All you need to know is that Lara goes looking for stuff in exotic locations in Peru, Greece and Egypt, and swings, climbs grapples and shoots her way to all kinds of relics and artefacts, slaying several endangered species along the way, in true Tomb Raider tradition.
Level design has always been a hallmark of the earlier games, and Anniversary doesn’t disappoint. For the most part the levels flow from one to another and each level is only broken by a quick summary of your performance. The new levels seem mostly well-designed and often remind the TR veteran of the originals with similar layouts and positioning of key objects. The old block-based game engine and square-based jumping is well and truly in the past now, and Anniversary allows for many more errors in judgement than the old game did. It’s disappointing to find then, that the game has so many invisible walls to hem you in, and that Lara seems so reluctant to go climbing somewhere “just to see if you can get there” – a thing that was such a feature of the original Tomb Raider. Some of the relics are well hidden and tricky to get to but they’re rarely put anywhere that doesn’t look like you should try to get there just to check, removing a lot of the potential mystery of exploration. Nonetheless many locations like the Lost Valley, St. Francis’ Folly and the Sphynx are all here and are just about as good to play as they were all those years ago. Sadly there was no “wow!” factor when I swung Lara on to the Sphynx’s head – clambering up there and the camera panning back to reveal the sheer scale was one of the original game’s stand-out moments.
Anniversary plays well as you’d expect an update of Legend to do, and Lara clambers around like a gorgeous monkey. But problems arise with the two new features. The first is that now Lara’s grapple can be used to “wall run” (grapple a hook on a wall to swing along it, then leap onward, or launch herself away from the wall at an angle). This may sound like a good idea and to be fair it often works flawlessly. Problems arise because of terrible camera placement (you can move the camera but it always ‘snaps’ back) leaving you clueless as to where you’re jumping to, leading to lots of leaps of faith and deaths for nothing more than experimental purposes – and Crystal Dynamics should know that gamers hate both of those. Further problems arise because of the way Lara sometimes perceives the relative inputs from your joypad. This might sound like a load of complete nonsense, but anyone who’s walked a 3D character into a room, only for the game to swap the relative direction of the movement to the joypad around meaning you turn around and walk straight back out, will know what I mean. Many sections will have to be replayed because you have to "learn" how to do it and get around the game's idiosyncrasies, rather than because of the actual difficulty or skill involved.
And second, yet another game has a go at Max Payne’s bullet time (yawn). Yes, now even Lara gets to slow down time to shoot stuff more accurately and Adrenaline Dodge™ has to be the most annoying and pointless use of it yet. Annoy a creature enough and it’ll go into a “rage” and charge at you, then if you press ‘B’ at the right moment you get the chance to shoot the thing in the head, doing it massive damage and usually killing it. The problem is that the first time you’ll really need to use this is probably at the much-anticipated rematch with the T-Rex in the new Lost Valley, but this potentially thrilling fight becomes a tedious matter of an almost pre-scripted bull fight – the fact that the T-Rex looks less like one of Jurassic Park’s monsters than Bowser - the king of the Koopas - doesn’t help things much either.
As previously in the TR games you can also drop out of the adventure and visit Croft Manor at any time. This is basically a training level, but as in Legend there is much more to do here than simply learn to jump, swing and climb before heading into the main game. There’s a lot to see and plenty of secrets to uncover here too.
Graphically Anniversary – a game that looked excellent on the PS2 - rarely makes the 360 more than tick over despite using the Legend engine. Some nice views that look impressive from a distance don’t look so good close up, and only better water, a few more particle effects and a higher resolution distinguish this from the PS2 version. Nonetheless, the environments look terrific with lighting playing a significant role in making the atmosphere right. It looks like we’ll have to wait for a true next gen Lara, as she didn’t get much in the way of a body makeover either, and as fluidly animated as she is, looks kind of basic compared to some of the 360’s latest efforts. The game also suffers from really terrible clipping (Lara or parts of Lara disappear into scenery), and I really hoped we might see less of this particular gaming aberration on this generation of games/consoles. You’ll also notice that bodies disappear, they didn’t in the early PlayStation games, so why the heck do they now?
Whatever you think of Lara (and I’ve loved her through the good and the bad ever since I first took control of her) she’s clearly a long way from retiring to the old archaeologists home, and Anniversary holds true to the original and proves that the mixture of exploration and platform puzzling is as appealing as it ever was. Unlockables, such as photos, commentaries, alternative outfits, as well as time trials and achievements for allsorts will keep fans playing for ages.
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