Difficulty:

Hard

Time Spent:

10 to 20 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Mixed reactions"

Reviewing Tomb Raider Anniversary presents an interesting dilemma in that it is essentially a product born of fan service. As a direct remake of the original Tomb Raider released back in 1996, Anniversary is in many ways deliberately recreating an outdated experience, ignoring most of the advancements in game design the medium as experienced over the last decade. As a hybrid of old and new game styles it never fully gels together creating something that will only be appreciated by a small, specific audience. For everyone else what is left is a disappointing and infuriating gaming experience.

As someone who played all the way through Lara's original exploit around a dozen times back in the day, I originally approached this title with high hopes and for the first few hours Anniversary leaves a good first impression. Powered by the same technology behind the brief but enjoyable built-from-the-ground-up Tomb Raider Legend released the year before, Anniversary looks, sounds and controls exactly like it right down to the animations. Lara is a joy to control with a mouse and keyboard as you direct her around the tombs on display, vaulting, shimming, swinging, swimming and otherwise traversing the well designed environments. The levels themselves have been lovingly recreated and expanded upon capturing all the memorable landmarks, puzzles and overall ambiance of the originals whilst incorporating elements designed around Lara's expanded skill set from Legend such as her handy grappling hook.

Unfortunately things go pear shaped from there. Simply put the game is ball breaking, mind numbingly difficult. In an effort to capture the razor edge tension of the 1996 classic, the developers quickly ratchet up the difficulty setting after the first few levels in which every single hazard typically results in instant, unavoidable death. Unlike the more forgiving Legend, such hazards are rarely telegraphed so the only way to conquer them is via trial and error, with every such error taking you straight to the reload screen. No butts about it, Lara will die over and over and over again to such an extent that the sickening sounds she makes when every single bone in her body is pulverized by a long fall or booby trap eventually stops making you wince and instead simply makes you sigh in defeat. Only a handful of games have ever brought me to the keyboard smashing edge of complete and utter despair and Tomb Raider Anniversary is one of them.

The problem is further compounded by checkpoints which, while generous in their frequency, are far from ideally placed. Instead of repositioning you say, right before a crushing wall trap that will turn Lara into a thick, sticky, red paste, it'll be down a long hallway a short distance away from said trap. At best this results in running down the same boring hallway after each death. At worst you'll be repeating the same series of mundane jumps and shimmies to reach the same tricky spot you met your demise at the previous half a dozen times. As you can imagine this quickly becomes tedious. Ironically this was less of a problem in the original game since its more primitive grid based level design made it easier to judge jumps and traps making death less frequent. Additionally the ability to quickly save your progress at any time (at least on the PC version) made death less of an annoyance should you fail to traverse a particularly troublesome section.

As for the rest of the game it is merely adequate. If anything Anniversary is a little too faithful to the original game with puzzles routinely falling back into the same old key hunting, switching hitting rut. One of the many strengths of Legend was just how well the puzzles and challenges were integrated into the level design and how elements such as physics where required to solve them. In contrast Anniversary's puzzles usually require nothing more than progressing from switch to switch, key to key all usually barred by a series of instant-death kill contraptions. When the game does introduce something new like a obelisk themed bridge puzzle in the Sanctuary of the Scion, or a multi-tiered water altering head-scratcher in St. Francis' Folly it feels very rewarding to play. Unfortunately even puzzles like these are repeated a little too often with the same exact sequences playing out a few levels later just on a slightly larger scale.

While most of Lara's abilities carry straight over from Legend, she does have a few new moves added to her skill set. Best amongst these is her ability to run along walls when using the grappling hook in specific situations. It looks great in action, requires some genuine skill to perform and is well integrated into the levels. Lara is also able to hop across the tops of poles and quickly recover when knocked down by her animal opponents. Speaking of which Lara returns to her old ways of wiping out nearly every endangered species known to man. Foes range from wolves, bears and lions to strange alien were-cat and centaur like creatures. As such all of Lara's cool combat moves she could use against human foes in Legend, but were otherwise completely useless against animal enemies, are missing. In their place is a new bullet time like slow-mo ability which Lara can use when enemies charge at her. If performed correctly she is able to take down most foes with a single head shot and every boss fight (which are basically puzzles themselves) requires the frequent use of this skill to defeat. Unfortunately this new mechanic requires perfect timing to perform and while it's adequate against single opponents, it simply isn't enjoyable to use when surrounded by entire groups of relentless foes, many which can easily kill you or worse, knock you off your feet, over a cliff and straight into instant death-ville.

The story is more or less a direct retelling of the original plot which, to be honest, was only remarkable back in the day because there actually was one. Even to the unfamiliar the plot is fairly generic and predictable. A few attempts have been made to tie the story into the rebooted, family themed continuum of Legend (and its sequel Underworld) but they feel tacked on at best and add nothing to the basic plot. Characterization is very minimal with the rich personality and strong, family based motivations of Lara forged in Legend mostly missing this time around. There is a brief attempt at character development regarding Lara's increased ease at killing naughty people but its barely touched on and comes off as a little silly. On the bright side all the FMV cut-scenes have been faithfully recreating using the in-game engine. While the dialogue has been changed and rerecorded with the current voice actors, it never strays far from the source material and a few memorable lines have been kept which will make die-hard fans smile.

Graphically Anniversary is decent if unimpressive. Most likely due to its incredibly short production schedule, the developers chose not to include the vastly superior next-gen graphics found on the X-BOX 360 and PC versions of Legend. Instead it features a design style similar to the PS2 and Gamecube versions of that game. While the results are hardly ugly and feature some nice filter effects and smooth animations it still looks dated when compared next to the real time lighting and higher resolution textures of Legend's next-gen mode and other games of the time. Sound wise the game fairs better with solid sound effects, decent voice acting and a great remix of the original Tomb Raider theme. The music itself is kept to a minimum with the developers opting for a more ambient sound design similar to the original game that helps enforce the isolationist vibe the game is going for.

At 8-10 hours in length the main campaign is roughly twice the size of Legend. Along with the Croft Manor bonus level which is filled with its own puzzles to solve, multiple secrets to find, bonus to unlock and time trials to complete, the game could potentially keep you busy for some time. Unfortunately its hard to recommend this game to anyone besides masochists. Die hard fans will probably not appreciate the modern control scheme and liberties taken with the source material (not when the original game is still more than playable with DosBox), while more modern gamers who came to the series with Legend will lament the aging presentation and antiquated and unforgiving game-design. Anniversary no doubt fills that particular niche some fans are looking for, but for the rest of us I recommend skipping this one entirely and going straight to Underworld.