It's new to me: Tomb Raider Anniversary

A remake of Lara Croft's first adventure

This column is “It’s new to me,” in which I’ll play a game I’ve never played before — of which there are still many despite my habits — and then write up my thoughts on the title, hopefully while doing existing fans justice. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

Tomb Raider isn’t new to me, by any means. As a series, at least. The first adventure of Lara Croft eluded me for years, however — growing up as an N64 kid instead of a Playstation one had a lot to do with that, especially since Tomb Raider had lost much of its cool factor through overexposure and underdeveloped sequels by the time I had a Playstation 2.

Those initial Core Design games — of which there were at least one of them released every year from 1996 through 2003 — went from astounding in their ambition and gameplay to a mess that nearly killed the franchise entirely. What helped save it — in addition to stopping the production of these games for a few years so the stink of The Angel of Darkness could float away and be forgotten — is that development duties were handed over from Core Design to Crystal Dynamics. They began their run with a reboot of the entire series titled Tomb Raider: Legend, which released in 2006.

Legend modernized the design of Lara Croft a bit, as well as the gameplay, and everything was just implemented in a much more enjoyable fashion across the board. Metacritic scores aren’t everything, of course, but Angel of Darkness scored a 52 out of 100 on PS2 and a 49 on PC in 2003, and was so panned that Paramount blamed it for the poorer than expected domestic box office for the second Tomb Raider film that starred Angelina Jolie. Whether that’s entirely the heart of the matter is up for debate, of course, but it couldn’t have helped: it at least had helped poison the well. When you consider that Legend scored 8/10 and B grades all over just a few years later then, it says something about how much Crystal Dynamics had managed to clean up said well. It helps, too, that they were able to look around at what else was going on in games at the time, like with Ubisoft’s heralded Prince of Persia reboot series: controlling Lara was a lot more fun in Legend than it had been in some time, because she had all kinds of things she could do now, and you could do them more easily than before.

Tomb Raider Anniversary came out the next year, in 2007, and was built using Legend’s gameplay and engine. It’s a remake of the original Tomb Raider, which historically remains a vitally important work, but in the present plays a lot like a 3D action adventure game with some of the more annoying aspects of 1996 contained within. As Stefan Fouracre-Smith wrote in a 2021 retrospective:

To maximize the use of Lara’s move set effectively, the developers based all of the game environments on a 3D grid system. This was from before the era of analog controllers, so it made some kind of sense at the time. This allows the player to use the grids to learn and judge the distance of a far away ledge before taking a jump. Functionally, it’s similar to how movement works in the original Prince of Persia games. This should, in theory, lead to Lara fluidly moving around each level, negotiating her dangerous surroundings with ease and finesse. Unfortunately in practice this feels pretty rough, particularly due to the tank controls for turning movement. It’s functional for leisurely exploration but is restrictive and frustrating when dealing with one of the game’s many death traps. It was frustrating at the time but for a modern player, it will probably feel absolutely archaic.

Everything looks 3D, especially in continuous motion, but you still have to be aware of this invisible grid you’re playing within: movement isn’t quite as free as you’re visually led to believe, and miscalculating can be a real problem when you’re trying to successfully see through the kind of platforming ambition that Core Design had for Tomb Raider. This would be something you could get the hang of even in our spoiled present-day, sure, but consider that Tomb Raider also includes limited single-save checkpoints: you’re going to end up more frustrated than happy in a game where you need to work things out through practice, when the game punishes you for having to practice. Worth it in the early days of 3D adventuring in 1996 (where it sold seven million copies), less so in 2007, which is one reason why it got a makeover from the series’ new developers at that latter date.

Crystal Dynamics also managed to bring in Toby Gard — the original artist and conceptualizer of Lara Croft and Tomb Raider — for the remake as a writer, just as they had for Legend. Gard, among others on the original development team, had left Core Design to form another studio after seeing how Lara Croft was marketed by publisher Eidos. Lara, as you might have noticed or heard about if you’ve been around video games at all, became a star larger than her series in no small part because of how easy it was to market sex appeal. She was on the cover of magazines like a real celebrity, took part in a U2 tour of all things, and was generally heavily sexualized to gain attention for the series. As Jeremy Parish discussed at 1Up over a decade ago:

It seems laughable today, but Lara Croft -- whose not-entirely-selfless exploits in ancient ruins and caverns firmly established her as the eponymous tomb raider -- was sold as a sex symbol. It wasn't a joke then, though; eager gamers lapped it up. The Tomb Raider games sold millions of copies apiece, at least until monotonous sequels and aging technology bled away fans. More than that, Lara herself was an icon. Tomb Raider publisher Eidos quickly made her sex appeal the focus of their ads for the games and tried eagerly to recreate it for lesser games such as Deathtrap Dungeon and Fear Effect. Douglas Coupland, author of seminal pop culture treatises Generation X and Microserfs, penned a book about her importance. Irish rockers U2 plastered her image across their massive LED concert screens (though this was admittedly at the peak of PopMart, their Andy Kaufmann-esque piss take on media culture, so their reverence for Lara may or may not have been ironic). Oscar-winning sex-bomb Angelina Jolie was cast to play Lara for two silver-screen adventures. The string of models officially representing the character at industry events became fixtures of British gossip rags, and one even parlayed her turn as Lara into a high-profile Playboy spread.

Gard did not approve of this marketing tactic (nor of creative control being taken from him after the first game became a hit), and so he left. You can imagine that he thought something like, “She’s not bad, she’s just marketed that way!” before taking off, which is a joke, sure, but also true! There was nothing in the original Tomb Raider that indicated you were in for a sexy time, but that’s how it was all marketed. Granted, Gard did respond to a question from The Face magazine about Lara’s “unfeasibly large knockers” with “Slip of the mouse,” so it’s not as if he didn’t give life to Eidos’ monster in the first place. But I’m also not here to pass to judgment on how Lara Croft was drawn on the cover of her game boxes vs. how she looked in-game, or whether heavily stylized proportions are Inherently Bad or anything like that: I like Vanillaware games too much for that sort of thing, which is also a far more complicated and convoluted topic than it’s sometimes given credit for. The goal here is to simply point out that Gard didn’t like how his creation was marketed, and so, he left her with Core Design, and returned when given the chance by Crystal Dynamics.

Lara Croft was given an actual magazine modeling spread in this The Face feature that also included a Q&A with series creator Toby Gard. Image credit: Tomb of Ash

Anniversary is far from a perfect game, as it’s often frustrating to play through, but it’s also clearly the definitive version of the original Tomb Raider given all of the care put into bringing it into the present day. The checkpoint system has been revamped so that they are no longer single-use and scattered wide, but now fairly regular and pop again and again whenever you pass those points in your backtracking. And you’re able to save your progress from anywhere, as well, though, saves reload at the last checkpoint, not in the spot where you saved your game. Lara has a wide array of moves she can make: she can jump and climb, do a longer jump when you get a running start and hold the button down longer, grab on to ledges or right herself with a button press if she’s slipping, somersault through the air, dive, use a grappling hook to swing and jump or wall run, swim both above and under water… Lara Croft has got a whole bunch of moves at her disposal. And also guns. More on the guns later, though.

You’ll use this wide variety of moves to make your way through four different locations, three of which are tombs housing secrets of the lost civilization of Atlantis, and the fourth of which is a mine that leads into an ancient, underground pyramid full of monsters, lava, and a woman who is as terrifying as she is ancient and powerful. And she’s not thrilled with you, either. There are hidden artifacts and relics to find along your way, the discovery of which will unlock extras and bonuses for you. There are time trials, which are a real challenge given how complex some of the environmental stuff can get. There’s quite a bit of game here if you want there to be, but if you also just want to see the job Lara is assigned through to the end as quickly and with as few interruptions and diversions as possible, you can do that, too.

Tomb Raider has been likened to the Indiana Jones film series in some ways, given their joint ties to archaeology, exploration around the world, and some mystical, powerful secrets unearthed by them. Tomb Raider gets to the mystical goods much faster than the Indiana Jones movies do, however: while it takes until the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, for instance, to discover that not only is the Ark of the Covenant genuine but also capable of mystically face melting anyone who gazes upon what’s contained within, you’re not even an hour into your first mission in Tomb Raider, nor very deep into the first tomb you’re raiding, before you’re confronted with a bunch of dinosaurs. Living ones, at that. The how or why of them is never explained, which is fine. They’re dinosaurs, and they are there, with you. That’s enough.

Naughty Dog’s Uncharted series, which also aspired to be something of a new Indiana Jones, clearly pulled from Tomb Raider in terms of much of its gameplay, with the constant climbing and parkour and mystical bits, but like with Indiana Jones, it did try to ground the world it was in a bit more, so that the more miraculous, magical stuff was contained more toward the end of the experience. It also went a lot heavier on the violence than either of them, but that’s a discussion for another day — like while pointing out that the next Tomb Raider reboot that depicts a younger Lara in a more realistic world mostly borrows the concept of ludonarrative dissonance from Uncharted, even if some people who didn’t know better seemed to think it was Tomb Raider borrowing heavily from Uncharted instead of the other way around. Games are all borrowing from each other all the time, it’s fine, but if you’re going to make accusations, at least be accurate with them.

Anyway! Tomb Raider Anniversary certain does not lack for violence, but 99 percent of it is against animals and weird flesh creatures who look a little inside out. Honestly, Tomb Raider Anniversary would be a better game if it dropped most of that fighting: the fights aren’t challenging so much as they’re annoying — you can use your basic dual pistols with infinite ammo the entire game if you want to without much incident, and every fight boils down to just hitting the fire button a lot with auto-aim — and while the animal fights were toned down a bit this time around, you still end up shooting a bunch of gorillas and large cats to death. Who wants to do that?! Raptors? Fine. They’re trying to eat me, I’ve seen Jurassic Park, I know the deal here. Why is this tomb in Greece full of gorillas, though, and why are they coming at me in an underground coliseum? If you must have this level of combat, introduce the weird fleshy dudes earlier, especially since they end up connected to the villain of the game, anyway, or figure out more enemy types you wouldn’t see at the zoo.

As for the weapons and how they’re used, you have those dual-wielding pistols with unlimited ammo, a shotgun, a submachine gun, and a more powerful pair of pistols. The latter three all have limited ammo, but there’s enough of that in the game that you’ll never be in danger of running out, especially not when you can just save your most powerful stuff for the most dangerous encounters, or when multiple boss fights in the game are quick-time events instead of situations that have you unloading everything you’ve got. You can also conserve ammo a bit by shooting just enough to aggravate an enemy, causing a red flash to occur on their head: this signifies that they’re about to charge you. Dive out of the way of this charge, and time will slow down. Move the reticule over their head while time is slowed, and you’ll get an indication that it’s time to fire. Successfully pull this off, and any non-boss enemy you do this to will die, regardless of how much health they had left or if you were only using your weakest gun to do it. This is far and away the most interesting part of combat, because again, otherwise, it’s just you auto-targeting and then hitting the fire button a bunch, while occasionally diving out of the way to avoid a swipe of claws or a fireball.

One other thing I can praise with the combat, at least, is that Lara is opposed to killing other people: she only does it once, in the entire game, when she’s going to be gunned down first and then a great evil intent on controlling the entire world will be able to do so unopposed. And there’s an impact on her, mentally and emotionally. She almost seems relieved when two other humans she’s in combat with end up gunning each other down, because it keeps her from having that on her conscience, too. This is a much better model than Uncharted having you kill hundreds of dudes and then acting like its protagonist has never killed a man before in a cutscene for an unearned emotional beat. Uncharted games are great, don’t get me wrong, but it’s an example of how you can have a great game without all of the storytelling bits falling neatly, cohesively, alongside the actual gameplay. Tomb Raider Anniversary manages to be cohesive in this way, though.

Image credit: Hooked Gamers

Which is not to say all of Lara Croft’s behavior in the game makes sense or is exploited (complementary) how it should be. How does she see some dinosaurs early on in this adventure, and react to them mostly with a semi-surprised face? I’m not expecting nor desiring of MCU-level quipping here, but even a, “…huh” would have been an improvement. Lara is pretty quiet throughout, which is mostly fine — filling every empty space is unnecessary, with even the game’s soundtrack understanding that it will have more impact if it’s used more with more intentionality — but still. Dinosaurs! We’d all say something if we saw dinosaurs when we did not expect to see dinosaurs!

None of this detracts from Tomb Raider Anniversary in any meaningful way, at least. It’s just noticeable, things like the above, or that for whatever reason, Crystal Dynamics deciding not to dress Lara Croft in something warm as she ascended snow-capped mountains looking for a tomb containing an ancient Atlantian McGuffin. She even had something warm on over her skin-tight no-sleeve top in that scene in 1996, y’all, and they had to develop 3D movement in an invisible grid back then to give the illusion of an open space. You could have figured out how to put a jacket on your leading lady for a scene in 2007.

No, the only thing that’s actually “wrong” with Anniversary is that it feels like the longest 12-hour game I’ve played in ages. The pacing can be a bit all over the place, due to the trial-and-error nature of the environmental traversal, the often unnecessary combat, and controls that don’t always do what they say they do. You can get used to Tomb Raider’s expansive control scheme over time, and it feels wonderful when everything comes together, but you’ll also be reminded that vast improvements have been made in this regard in the last 15-plus years, especially as climbing and jumping in this manner and all that became more ubiquitous within the industry. Once again, a version of the original Tomb Raider was a little too ahead of the curve with its ambition! But still, you get used to it: just be prepared to die a few times in a row because even though you’re pretty sure you’re holding the control stick exactly the right way to perform a specific jump, you are, for reasons, not actually doing that and are about to jump in the opposite direction and to your death. I think I play enough video games to know when it’s me and when it’s not, and this too often felt like not me at fault. And yet, who was punished?

Also harming the pacing a bit is that the game simply refuses to end. You get through three progressively larger and longer tombs that expect more and more from you — this is all to the good, because as the climbing and jumping and puzzle-solving became more intense and intricate, the game becomes more enjoyable and rewarding — but the last bits all seem to have just one area or encounter too many in a way that had me putting the controller down far more often than I would have liked. It often felt like you were about to hit the very end of a tomb or what have you in the game’s second half, only for it to turn out that you were just entering another huge room with a huge puzzle to solve, which, if you were lucky, would take you to the end of that place. But more likely is that you would then go to yet another room. It probably would have felt a little less exhausting if not for the constant dying and retrying, but it’s all there, and I was exhausted nonetheless.

Now, all of that being said, Tomb Raider Anniversary is still a good time. It’s just tough to plow through its dozen-plus hours in a row, because it will inevitably frustrate you in a way that has you walk away and come back later. You will come back, though, that’s the thing, because when you make Lara dive through two walls slamming together before they can pancake you, when you dive away from an enemy attack, kicking off a brief slow-motion process that lets you headshot a dinosaur to kill it, when you pull off a complicated series of wall jumps and wall runs and ledge grabs that bring you to a place you weren’t sure you could get to… it feels great.

Tomb Raider Anniversary released on the Playstation 2, Windows, Wii, Playstation Portable, and Xbox 360 in 2007, with that version backwards-compatible in the present on the Xbox One and Series S|X. The Wii version had motion controls and some changes made to various parts of the game (like enemies in one version but not another; nothing major), and opinions were split on them, though they worked just fine for me. Or, I should say, they were no less reliable than the standard controller inputs. It also received a Playstation 3 release in 2011, as part of a collection that included all three Tomb Raider titles in this trilogy: Legend, Anniversary, and Underworld. This reboot trilogy that explored Lara’s origins has been rebooted since in the trilogy that included Tomb Raider, Rise of the Tomb Raider, and Shadow of the Tomb Raider, which is just a reminder that you shouldn’t care too much about the canon of this series, since it’s all temporary. The games that are good are worth playing, so, worry about that more than what any of it means for what’s still canon.

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