Tomb Raider IV-VI Remastered review – the decline & fall of Lara Croft

Tomb Raider IV-VI Remastered – a great remaster of some pretty terrible games (Aspyr)

After the hugely successful remasters of the first three Tomb Raider games, The Last Revelation, Chronicles, and The Angel Of Darkness get the same treatment.

Retro gaming is a strange business; mostly because human memory has a way of changing over time, subconsciously retconning graphics, control schemes, and difficulty levels so that the reality of a game is never quite what you remember it as. So it can be a shock when you realise just how primitive older games actually were and how distressingly fallible our recollections can be.

This is what makes remakes so popular. They reimagine old games to be more like our memories of them, providing a comforting, rose-tinted revision of history. Officially, last year’s Tomb Raider I-III Remastered were merely remasters, but they went much further than just increasing the resolution and frame rate, breathing new life into the original three classic games.

Unfortunately, the next three games in the franchise are not as fondly remembered, either by players or the people who made them. Created and developed in Derby by Core Design, Tomb Raider was a surprise hit of epic proportions, but pressure put on the team by publisher Eidos created a conveyer belt of low quality sequels that led to the eventual closure of the studio.

Following the runaway success of the first two games, in the mid-90s, the World Economic Forum named Eidos the world’s fastest growing company. Like any publicly traded entity, its first duty was to its shareholders, so maintaining that meteoric rise was all it cared about. The original Tomb Raider had been built by a small team in less than 18 months and although they now had more people and resources the pressure upon them, to keep churning out new games, was greatly increased.

Through a combination of relentless crunch and lack of proper management, by 1999 the Tomb Raider team at Core were feeling completely burnt out, which is why they collectively decided to kill Lara in the final scene of the appropriately named Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation. Playing it today you can sense the fatigue.

Even with new modern options, the controls and camera are almost wilfully terrible. Its Egyptian setting takes you on a tour of Karnak, the pyramids at Giza, the sunken palaces of Cleopatra, and the Mosque of Ibn Tulun in Cairo, but gameplay fails to match the grandeur of its locations. Obtuse, inadequately explained puzzles, that seem designed to impede and infuriate, make this a very difficult game to love.

As in the first set of Tomb Raider remasters, pressing the Start button instantly switches between the modern and classic versions. This lets you see how much work has been done to tidy up their visuals, although once again all pre-rendered cut scenes remain unchanged, complete with terrible scripts and am dram voice-acting.

2000’s Tomb Raider: Chronicles didn’t fare much better. Opening with a televised wreath-laying ceremony at Lara Croft’s memorial, you swiftly find out she’s not really dead and is in fact ready to raid more tombs. The disjointed story takes place in four entirely disparate adventures, randomly shoehorned into a single game.

Rome, an abandoned submarine base, a haunted castle, and an office block become excuses to focus on different aspects of Tomb Raider’s core gameplay. Traversal, shooting, and stealth all get their moments in the sun, although the wildly varying quality of its segments is just as stark today – the haunted level remaining as cursed as its setting.

To be fair, you’d never guess this used to be a PS2 game (Aspyr)

The critical reception of the previous two games persuaded Eidos to give Core Design more time to finish The Angel Of Darkness, which debuted three years after Chronicles and, as the first entry on the PlayStation 2, was promoted as a soft reboot for the series. During that comparatively lengthy run-up promises were made about the upcoming game, and its planned uptick in quality, but when it finally arrived it was immediately evident that things were more broken than ever.

Launched the year after GTA: Vice City, it was a clumsy and mildly depressing game to play through then and still is now. It is trying to do things differently though, with a more complex story and selectable dialogue, as well strange, pseudo role-playing elements where Lara has to build up stats like her upper body strength by performing specific feats.

All of a sudden, she’s also now has a stamina bar, along with a small number of new moves and a greater emphasis on stealth than before. There’s also a second playable character – Kurtis Trent – available later in the game, who seems to have been intended as Lara’s love interest but was never seen again after this.

To the remaster’s credit, it adds in a considerable amount of previously cut content, including a throwing weapon, psychic shield, and sprint option for Kurtis. There’s also a cut section of the Paris level, a pawn shop, and a number of voice lines and inventory items that never made it into the original version. None of them make the game any more entertaining but they’re certainly a welcome addition for veteran fans.

Following its release, Eidos took the franchise away from Core, handing it to Crystal Dynamics in California, who gave it a much-needed reinvention. To this day Crystal Dynamics are still the custodians of the franchise, although it’s been a worryingly long time since anything has been heard about their planned new entry.

The Last Revelation, Chronicles, and The Angel of Darkness inadvertently tell a story of the decline and fall of a British icon, and it’s interesting to see them brought together. They’re a testament to the darker side of game development, where the strain of maintaining commercial growth in a hit driven industry takes its toll not only on the people who work in it, but also the quality of their work. Whether you want to pay to witness that first-hand is another matter.

Tomb Raider IV-VI Remastered review summary

In Short: The three worst Tomb Raider games, remastered for a modern audience but unable to overcome their archaic systems, dull action, and uninspired design.

Pros: The graphical overhaul is impressive and playing the games back-to-back gives a sense of how swiftly technology evolves, even if the game design hasn’t.

Cons: Controls are still awful, even after the remaster. Level design is awkward and old fashioned. Unlike the first compilation, none of the games were very good in the first place.

Score: 4/10

Formats: Xbox Series X/S (reviewed), Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, and PC
Price: £20.49
Publisher: Aspyr
Developer: Aspyr (originals by Core Design)
Release Date: 14th February 2025
Age Rating: 16

Kurtis Trent was never seen again (Aspyr)

Email [email protected], leave a comment below, follow us on Twitter, and sign-up to our newsletter.

To submit Inbox letters and Reader’s Features more easily, without the need to send an email, just use our Submit Stuff page here.

For more stories like this, check our Gaming page.