Written by Jeff Buckland, 6/4/2007
Played on:
Windows
Pentium M 2GHz CPU
2GB DDR2 RAM
GeForce 7800GTX Go
Minimum:
1.4GHz Intel CPU
or Athlon XP 1500+
256MB RAM for XP
512MB RAM for Vista
Video: GeForce 3 or
Radeon 9000-series
Win 2K/XP/Vista
Back when everyone was going nuts over Super Mario 64 on the Nintendo 64, I was scoffing at it. I thought that taking a platform game and changing as little as possible while plopping it into 3 dimensions (which, back in the summer and fall of 1996 was pretty damn new and unique) was the wrong way to go. I severely disliked Super Mario 64 and still can't make myself enjoy it. Yes, I said it. The reason why? Because I had played Tomb Raider on a PC equipped with a 3Dfx Voodoo card and from a graphics perspective, it was amazing. Sure, Quake was incredible as well, but Tomb Raider was much more of an intimate, mysterious, but excellent action/adventure game. Quake was what I played at the computer store on the LAN with the other guys, but Tomb Raider was what I played when I got home. And Mario 64? Not even a blip on my radar.
The Tomb Raider franchise spent years faltering after repeated attempts from Core Design to turn it into some kind of a pure action franchise, but it turns out that Lara Croft and her gymnastics-oriented, dual-pistol-wielding antics just didn't lend themselves well to a typical action formula (although that design did turn out pretty well for the two Angelina Jolie movies). Once Eidos realized this, they brought back the original creator, Toby Gard, and got the American developers at Crystal Dynamics to focus their efforts into last year's Tomb Raider: Legend. Finally, we got to see this decade-old franchise come back to former glory. Lara Croft, the Tomb Raider, was finally actually raiding tombs again.
And now, Eidos has come round full circle. Tomb Raider: Anniversary is a remake of the original game, with the new Legend graphics and physics engine and 100% new art, models, textures, level design, and quite a bit more. Just about every classic moment from the original Tomb Raider is here and redone, while many of the devious spacial-challenge puzzles are reproduced with maybe a new twist here and there. Lara can do all of her original moves, including that totally excessive handstand when coming up over a ledge, the classic swan dive off of a waterfall into a pool below (or if you'd rather be a little more sadistic, onto the ground next to it - fatal falls like this cause some pretty amusing ragdoll physics now), and all the leaping and flipping you remember as well.
The developers have reached back into some of their previous enhancements to Lara Croft's move list and put some of them here into Anniversary. She can now grapple off of hooks and even do short wall-runs using her grapple, she can balance on vertical wooden poles, dodge in any direction, and more. Most of Lara's abilities are introduced to the player in the first level, although the Croft Manor is also available as a tutorial to teach players the skills they need in the real game (although this level itself is a unique and fun challenge in its own right that can take you in excess of an hour to finish). If you've played Tomb Raider: Legend and remember it in the slightest, then you can probably just jump right into Anniversary with no problems, but the Croft Manor level is worth playing no matter what.
During the game's 14 levels you'll find that the parallels to the original Tomb Raider's levels are quite clear. You'll start off at an Incan temple buried deep into the Andes Mountains in Peru, but from there you'll visit lost cathedrals in Greece and even some Egyptian pyramids. The game does add some story in here by way of cutscenes, and some of these are interactive in that popular God of War style where you have to hit a direction or a button in order to win them. Well, here, you only have one of the four directions to hit and you get a comparatively big chunk of time to do it in, so there isn't really much challenge here. But it is a nice way to keep players on their toes.
The atmosphere of the original Tomb Raider was vastly different from some of the later games, and that has been reproduced in Anniversary. Here, you are alone most of the time and with a slow, brooding soundtrack, you'll feel truly lost, buried in some ruins hundreds of miles from any real civilization. Yes, all that is conveyed nicely here, and the sparse amount of talking - from Lara or other characters - is actually very refreshing to me. Even the most hardcore of action games recently is constantly trying to add atmosphere and immerse you in by having conversations between the characters and maybe the protagonist as well. Here, it's quieter and you'll have time to slow down and figure things out without having some poorly-thought out character barking one of the same three bits of voice acting at you.
It's not all just running around and doing front-flips, though. You'll come across plenty of enemies in Tomb Raider: Anniversary, most of which consist of various forms of wildlife. From bats to bears, cougars, alligators, gorillas, species once thought extinct and on to a bit of the supernatural, you will often have your hands full with these fast-moving foes. You'll need to hop and flip around while firing, all of which is easily done with Anniversary's generous auto-aim. You see, the original game didn't intend to challenge your ability to aim like most shooters at the time did - it wanted to see how well you could maneuver to stay away from agile enemies that liked to charge you at high speed. That style of combat is definitely back in Anniversary, with the new feature of being able to do the occasional slow-motion dodge where you must time a single shot to either instantly kill your enemy or at least severely injure it.
