[It'll probably need to be edited a bunch, to add pictures among other things. I'll take care of it if it's approved, promise.]
Tomb Raider 6 is probably one of the games I’ve been the most conflicted about all my life. By the time I played it, I'd already played previous games and grown a real fondness for the character of Lara Croft; you're easily impressionnable at five. She was a fictional adult whom real-life adults knew about, she killed bad guys with akimbo guns, and she looked great doing it. Then came the marketing for Tomb Raider : Angel of Darkness, with blue flames framing her silhouette and a darker look in her eyes. It doesn’t take much to make an elementary school student think “This is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen” and mean it. The thing is, TR6 bombed, critically, commercially, however you want to frame it. Lara Croft helmed 3D platforming alongside Super Mario 64 in 1996, and on the way to the sixth generation, she crashed. The lofty game design ideas gave way to the reality of Core Design’s split team, the technical limitations of the PS2, and time.
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Like a lot of franchises making the jump to next gen, Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness was a renewal of the Tomb Raider franchise. It’s obvious from the start that the series is trying to be more: the storyline picks up from a previous game, with Lara just barely escaping The Final Revelation and blaming her former mentor for the ordeal. This might not seem like much, but it’s something new. Lara has feelings about events that took place in a previous game. #6 simply goes into things with a renewed sense of what to do with its protagonist. Lara is no longer the geared-up aristocrat that we recognize: she’s now a murder suspect, cut from her resources and hunted by the police. The best thing about Angel of Darkness is that it really does add a lot of weight to Lara Croft's characterization: cold, calculating, very proud but not altogether unfeeling. It alligns perfectly with what knew of her from previous games: ruthlessly ambitious and self-interested, now pushed into a corner.
It’s a shame that Tomb Raider 6’s gameplay is making her comeback a clumsy one. This goes for both of the remaster’s control schemes, Tank and Modern (360° directional movement), or the original controls, a weird mix of both. None of these feel consistent or functional enough; Tank loses mobility, Modern loses fine control, and the original is the worst of both worlds. None really allow for the precision platforming that’s asked of you, at least not without accidental deaths and some serious finagling. It doesn’t matter if you’re using your keyboard or controller, original or remaster; there will be unintended movements, there will be ledges you will run off of despite holding the “don’t run off ledges” button. And there’s also the rest of the gameplay.
The addition of hand-to-hand combat was featured in the original marketing, but it’s two very rigid strings of hits and nothing else. Instead of the fluid auto-aim system of yore, Lara now slides into a “more cinematic” lock-on system during enemy encounters, that has its own movement animations and feels even worse to control, locking you in one of eight directions while a sidestep animation plays out. This goes both for CQC and gunplay, and it’s one of the things that make the addition of stealth even more insulting and awkward. You can press yourself to a wall with a rigid animation. But first, you have to be in Stealth Mode, which is also triggered with its own specific animation. Stealth Mode’s walking speed is faster than most enemies', but it gives you the turning radius of a semi truck, is mutually exclusive with readying a weapon in the original version, and lacks specific animations for stairs. You might already see the issues popping up. The levels themselves aren’t designed for Stealth Mode, and that’s because it’s the most unfinished aspect of the game. All-in-all, there are very few occasions to use stealth that aren’t completely superseded by a head-on assault; once you have a gun, ammo and health items, you really just might as well awkwardly shuffle around your enemies while rapid-firing your semi-auto handgun. Yes, as fast as you press the button.
Tomb Raider 6 does feature ambitious storytelling and interesting level design for its context. For starters, the world-building is much more purposeful than it ever has been in the franchise. This time, there’s no secret continent of Atlantis, no Italian-mafia-based cult worshipping a Chinese legend. What we’re dealing with here is slightly more based in real world mythology: the enemy faction is an ancient order of alchemists, Lara is the prime suspect for a series of ritual killings, the Ancient Evil comes from Abrahamic apocrypha, and there’s even fictional early-Renaissance artwork thrown into the mix. It’s goth Dan Brown on uppers and candy corn. (For pointers, Broken Sword is Dan Brown on SSRIs.)
The levels do feel fresh for the series. On the run from the Parisian police, Lara is shimmying off the side of buildings, climbing the lighting rig of a discotheque, climbing up from the sewers and into an artitecturally-accurate Louvre museum; it's interesting to see her moveset adapted to urban environments, and seeing her express her acrobatic skills differently. Despite the complaints of the press at the time, there are plenty of extended sequences of actual tomb raiding, even under the Louvre, with all the spike traps and switch puzzles that you’d expect from a Tomb Raider game. They’re probably some of best experiences you’ll get out of the gameplay, being treated more like dungeons that you need to access from the game's two hubs.
But none of that matters in the face of the cold, hard truth: Tomb Raider 6 was butchered. The first “hub” of sorts has a couple of pick-ups and handful of optional NPCs, all of which point to or unlock progression-relevant NPCs. It’s not that they’re badly-written, but they highlight how empty the levels feel. The game always tracks your money, as early as the very first level, but in the original version of Tomb Raider 6, there were only three dialogue interactions in the whole game which allowed you to use currency. You couldn’t buy health items, or ammo, or weapons, leaving several NPCs present but entirely useless. The second “hub”, meanwhile, is a twenty-minutes affair between two linear sequences.
There's also the much maligned addition of a male deuteragonist. Kurtis Trent really doesn't get much to do, appearing here and there with nothing to say until the third act. That's when we finally get to see him and Lara interact, and he gets to be the player character for a couple of levels. Their dialogue is well-written; they have genuine tension and an interesting dynamic, but there's just so little in the text that makes their cooperation climactic instead of just another narrative beat. The angle was such: he was from an ancient order of lawful-do-gooders and she's a chaotic-neutral self-employed mercenary. There's texture in this opposition, but again, we only get to see it in action in two scenes at best.
In a better world, this would be the paragraph that begins with “And the remaster that promised to make this game more functional worked it all out”, but that’s not really how things go. The internal team at Aspyr was also rushed. Development of the second Tomb Raider Remastered trilogy began early after the release of the first collection, and it came with a major issue: while 4 and 5 worked in the same engine as their previous efforts, Tomb Raider 6 did not. Realistically, that meant re-working assets for two of the most graphically ambitious Tomb Raider games, and then fixing up its most maligned entry from the ground up for a release date on Valentine’s Day, Lara’s birthday.
I’ll say this, about the post-mortem-care-Remastered-version of Tomb Raider 6. It’s a subtle, well-made visual re-imagining that brings it perfectly in-line with the rest of the remasters, which already did a great job in equalizing Lara’s design across different entries. It’s a valiant effort in restoring the game to its on-paper glory, one which reintroduces cut content I never would have thought possible, like the deuteragonist’s unique melee system, functionning shops and a slew of small details that make it interesting to returning players as obsessed as me. It also finally fulfilled the promise on the back cover that Lara Croft could use two guns at once, like she always could before; but it's a fresh coat of paint on a car missing half its engine. There's nothing that shows this more than the remnants of the RPG progression system, left bare, with random interactions unlocking necessary power-ups just as they did when I was a child.
___
Would I recommend either version, original or remastered, to other people? I have endless love for this entry of the Tomb Raider series, but the answer is no. Maybe, if your curiosity outweighs your intolerance for jank. It's like a Deus Ex Human Revolution that'd had its wings clipped and claws removed. I do think that Tomb Raider 6 makes Classic Lara Croft into a more interesting character by solidifying her as morally ambiguous, but that doesnt make the experience any more enjoyable for a newcomer. There's a reason I stream this game to my friends instead of making them play it.
Tomb Raider 6 is probably one of the games I’ve been the most conflicted about all my life. By the time I played it, I'd already played previous games and grown a real fondness for the character of Lara Croft; you're easily impressionnable at five. She was a fictional adult whom real-life adults knew about, she killed bad guys with akimbo guns, and she looked great doing it. Then came the marketing for Tomb Raider : Angel of Darkness, with blue flames framing her silhouette and a darker look in her eyes. It doesn’t take much to make an elementary school student think “This is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen” and mean it. The thing is, TR6 bombed, critically, commercially, however you want to frame it. Lara Croft helmed 3D platforming alongside Super Mario 64 in 1996, and on the way to the sixth generation, she crashed. The lofty game design ideas gave way to the reality of Core Design’s split team, the technical limitations of the PS2, and time.
___
Like a lot of franchises making the jump to next gen, Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness was a renewal of the Tomb Raider franchise. It’s obvious from the start that the series is trying to be more: the storyline picks up from a previous game, with Lara just barely escaping The Final Revelation and blaming her former mentor for the ordeal. This might not seem like much, but it’s something new. Lara has feelings about events that took place in a previous game. #6 simply goes into things with a renewed sense of what to do with its protagonist. Lara is no longer the geared-up aristocrat that we recognize: she’s now a murder suspect, cut from her resources and hunted by the police. The best thing about Angel of Darkness is that it really does add a lot of weight to Lara Croft's characterization: cold, calculating, very proud but not altogether unfeeling. It alligns perfectly with what knew of her from previous games: ruthlessly ambitious and self-interested, now pushed into a corner.
It’s a shame that Tomb Raider 6’s gameplay is making her comeback a clumsy one. This goes for both of the remaster’s control schemes, Tank and Modern (360° directional movement), or the original controls, a weird mix of both. None of these feel consistent or functional enough; Tank loses mobility, Modern loses fine control, and the original is the worst of both worlds. None really allow for the precision platforming that’s asked of you, at least not without accidental deaths and some serious finagling. It doesn’t matter if you’re using your keyboard or controller, original or remaster; there will be unintended movements, there will be ledges you will run off of despite holding the “don’t run off ledges” button. And there’s also the rest of the gameplay.
The addition of hand-to-hand combat was featured in the original marketing, but it’s two very rigid strings of hits and nothing else. Instead of the fluid auto-aim system of yore, Lara now slides into a “more cinematic” lock-on system during enemy encounters, that has its own movement animations and feels even worse to control, locking you in one of eight directions while a sidestep animation plays out. This goes both for CQC and gunplay, and it’s one of the things that make the addition of stealth even more insulting and awkward. You can press yourself to a wall with a rigid animation. But first, you have to be in Stealth Mode, which is also triggered with its own specific animation. Stealth Mode’s walking speed is faster than most enemies', but it gives you the turning radius of a semi truck, is mutually exclusive with readying a weapon in the original version, and lacks specific animations for stairs. You might already see the issues popping up. The levels themselves aren’t designed for Stealth Mode, and that’s because it’s the most unfinished aspect of the game. All-in-all, there are very few occasions to use stealth that aren’t completely superseded by a head-on assault; once you have a gun, ammo and health items, you really just might as well awkwardly shuffle around your enemies while rapid-firing your semi-auto handgun. Yes, as fast as you press the button.
Tomb Raider 6 does feature ambitious storytelling and interesting level design for its context. For starters, the world-building is much more purposeful than it ever has been in the franchise. This time, there’s no secret continent of Atlantis, no Italian-mafia-based cult worshipping a Chinese legend. What we’re dealing with here is slightly more based in real world mythology: the enemy faction is an ancient order of alchemists, Lara is the prime suspect for a series of ritual killings, the Ancient Evil comes from Abrahamic apocrypha, and there’s even fictional early-Renaissance artwork thrown into the mix. It’s goth Dan Brown on uppers and candy corn. (For pointers, Broken Sword is Dan Brown on SSRIs.)
The levels do feel fresh for the series. On the run from the Parisian police, Lara is shimmying off the side of buildings, climbing the lighting rig of a discotheque, climbing up from the sewers and into an artitecturally-accurate Louvre museum; it's interesting to see her moveset adapted to urban environments, and seeing her express her acrobatic skills differently. Despite the complaints of the press at the time, there are plenty of extended sequences of actual tomb raiding, even under the Louvre, with all the spike traps and switch puzzles that you’d expect from a Tomb Raider game. They’re probably some of best experiences you’ll get out of the gameplay, being treated more like dungeons that you need to access from the game's two hubs.
But none of that matters in the face of the cold, hard truth: Tomb Raider 6 was butchered. The first “hub” of sorts has a couple of pick-ups and handful of optional NPCs, all of which point to or unlock progression-relevant NPCs. It’s not that they’re badly-written, but they highlight how empty the levels feel. The game always tracks your money, as early as the very first level, but in the original version of Tomb Raider 6, there were only three dialogue interactions in the whole game which allowed you to use currency. You couldn’t buy health items, or ammo, or weapons, leaving several NPCs present but entirely useless. The second “hub”, meanwhile, is a twenty-minutes affair between two linear sequences.
There's also the much maligned addition of a male deuteragonist. Kurtis Trent really doesn't get much to do, appearing here and there with nothing to say until the third act. That's when we finally get to see him and Lara interact, and he gets to be the player character for a couple of levels. Their dialogue is well-written; they have genuine tension and an interesting dynamic, but there's just so little in the text that makes their cooperation climactic instead of just another narrative beat. The angle was such: he was from an ancient order of lawful-do-gooders and she's a chaotic-neutral self-employed mercenary. There's texture in this opposition, but again, we only get to see it in action in two scenes at best.
In a better world, this would be the paragraph that begins with “And the remaster that promised to make this game more functional worked it all out”, but that’s not really how things go. The internal team at Aspyr was also rushed. Development of the second Tomb Raider Remastered trilogy began early after the release of the first collection, and it came with a major issue: while 4 and 5 worked in the same engine as their previous efforts, Tomb Raider 6 did not. Realistically, that meant re-working assets for two of the most graphically ambitious Tomb Raider games, and then fixing up its most maligned entry from the ground up for a release date on Valentine’s Day, Lara’s birthday.
I’ll say this, about the post-mortem-care-Remastered-version of Tomb Raider 6. It’s a subtle, well-made visual re-imagining that brings it perfectly in-line with the rest of the remasters, which already did a great job in equalizing Lara’s design across different entries. It’s a valiant effort in restoring the game to its on-paper glory, one which reintroduces cut content I never would have thought possible, like the deuteragonist’s unique melee system, functionning shops and a slew of small details that make it interesting to returning players as obsessed as me. It also finally fulfilled the promise on the back cover that Lara Croft could use two guns at once, like she always could before; but it's a fresh coat of paint on a car missing half its engine. There's nothing that shows this more than the remnants of the RPG progression system, left bare, with random interactions unlocking necessary power-ups just as they did when I was a child.
___
Would I recommend either version, original or remastered, to other people? I have endless love for this entry of the Tomb Raider series, but the answer is no. Maybe, if your curiosity outweighs your intolerance for jank. It's like a Deus Ex Human Revolution that'd had its wings clipped and claws removed. I do think that Tomb Raider 6 makes Classic Lara Croft into a more interesting character by solidifying her as morally ambiguous, but that doesnt make the experience any more enjoyable for a newcomer. There's a reason I stream this game to my friends instead of making them play it.
