Tomb Raider IV-V-VI Remastered

[Neon Ignition]

Out 14 February 2024 on all the same platforms, it'll be interesting to see the results for Angel Of Darkness. I enjoyed it back in the day.

[Wools]

This is very unexpected!

Really enjoyed revisiting 1, 2 and 3 through the 1st package and still working my way through them. Tomb Raiders 4, 5 and 6 aren't the high water mark in the Tomb Raider series but no games have ever bettered quite what TR does, so it'll be interesting to revisit these through 2025 lenses but all with a lick of paint.

[briareos_kerensky]

Wouldn't Angel Of Darkness require a rather large amount of work, considering the Timex partnership and general bugginess of the game?

[fallenangle]

Indeed. AoD is the weakest game of the entire series and the only one I've never replayed because it was so disappointing and very obviously a rushed game.

However TR4 is really good, a proper TR massive epic and, arguably the last great TR.

The only criticism that players had at the time was that it was 'just' set all in Egypt. An irrelevant whinge IMHO. I've replayed it (mostly on PC) in full at least ten times, the last being earlier this year. The only thing to dislike about this unapologeticly old school TR are the areas which spawn immortal scarabs and locusts every time you hit a trigger point. They do unavoidable damage and that becomes really tiresome in one of the Cairo levels you revisit a second time too and several of the later areas as well but for other reasons.

Unfortunately that sort of cheap gameplay continued with TR5 but with immortal rats, bats and other things instead. It is also short, about half the length of any of the previous games, and doesn't really add anything except a rather a poorly imagined new tightrope walking capability. Some other things in the later levels too can be annoying including serious game breaking glitches in the last level. Hopefully those have been fixed

TBH TR5 feels, a bit, as if Core had run out of enthusiasm and were just going through the motions. With AoD that becomes even more obvious with some bad ideas (Curtis Trent), missed opportunities and other half-hearted ideas that added nothing to the game.

I replayed TR5 most recently and whilst it is still enjoyable I would not want to play TR4 and TR5 back to back and certainly not AoD too.

[Tobal]

I never even thought of considering them to be 4,5,6. Had Revelations and Chronicles on the Dreamcast but never completed them, never played AoD. Can't say i'm interested in this collection with easy access to 4 and 5, really depends on improvements which i expect won't be good enough, one for the true diehards and collectors.

I guess this means in 2026 we'll get the remakes/reimagination of TR collection made up of Legends, Anniversary and Underworld.

[louzayong]

These are the kinds of remasters that the industry needs to make.

snaptube vidmate

[Asura]

Agreed that, IMO, these were on the downstroke for the franchise; with Lara shooting to being a pop culture icon in & around Tomb Raider 1&2, then 3 being so popular... But I think it's good to have them. Angel of Darkness was so profoundly unpopular and lambasted so much in the press, paired up with delays to its release and how it had the most cringe developer video I'd ever seen up to that point, that I think many people, even those who were fans of the earlier games, never played it, and may not even be aware of why the brand was seized and handed over to Crystal Dynamics.

[Neon Ignition]

I'm genuinely interested to see what QOL changes are made to AOD. For me, of the original 6 games it sat just behind TR1 and TR2, ahead of 3, 4 and 5 - however, I played it on PS2 and had the amazing good fortune that I didn't hit any bugs or glitches throughout my entire playthrough and so enjoyed it quite a bit.

[Asura]

Hopefully they've fixed - and this is really reaching back into the mists of my memory for this, so I may not be exactly right - but I recall that the reload button and "quick roll that changes your facing direction" button were the same, but it was context sensitive? If it wasn't those two controls, it was something like that; two critical controls you don't want to mix up were on the same context-sensitive button.

[QualityChimp]

I love Tomb Raider, but I swear III is the last one I played, not including the reboots and remakes, so a chance to play 4-6 with a nice new engine is definitely appealing.

[wakka]

As a kid, I actually really liked Chronicles because of the variety it provided and because it was shorter and more compact. III and IV were pretty tough going honestly for an under ten year old. As a more discerning adult I think I'd see it for what it is, though.

I remember an interview in a PS mag of the time with the Core team, which as I recall took place in a pub where everyone was drinking and smoking copiously - a massively far cry from how professionalised industry communications are today - where they expressed, and I'm repeating this verbatim, that they were 'massively pissed off' when told they'd have to turn out yet another TR. That game which pissed them off was Chronicles and probably the demotivation comes across in the final product.

Amazing how quickly games got turned out back in the day. There was a new TR every Christmas.

I'd be really interested to revisit the PS1 TR games at some point, I kind of can't decide whether I want to do it in their original forms or in these updates though.

[Dogg Thang]

If the collection is like the previous one, you can do both. I felt the remasters weren’t entirely successful visually so being able to switch to the classic look was a godsend.

I never finished with IV or Chronicles and never played the PS2 one so I’ll definitely be interested in this collection. I did enjoy replaying 1 and 2 on the recent remaster, and I’ll get around to 3 at some point. Haven’t bothered with any of the DLC but it’s nice that they included that too.

[wakka]

Oh that's good to know, I didn't realise that.

Are the controls the same as they were back in the day? Awkward as they were by today's standards, I liked the precision.

[Dogg Thang]

Oh that's good to know, I didn't realise that.

Are the controls the same as they were back in the day? Awkward as they were by today's standards, I liked the precision.

Again, they give you both. Updated controls or classic. And yeah, the games were designed for the precision of the original controls so I went with those.

[egparadigm]

Hopefully they've fixed - and this is really reaching back into the mists of my memory for this, so I may not be exactly right - but I recall that the reload button and "quick roll that changes your facing direction" button were the same, but it was context sensitive? If it wasn't those two controls, it was something like that; two critical controls you don't want to mix up were on the same context-sensitive button.

I’ll just save near this precipice…