Title Tomb Raider Annivesary Date 06.30.2007 Genre Action, Adventure Platform PC Developer Crystal Dynamics Publisher Eidos

The Good
- Outstanding visuals
- Solid controls
- Interesting and atmospheric levels
- Flawless blend of old and new
- It's $30

The Bad
- Some technical issues
- Camera-induced deaths are not rare
- They changed the pronunciation of Scion from "Sai-on" to "Skee-on"

Bottom Line
- Technical and artistic achievement for adventure games
- Lots of atmosphere with less hand-holding
- Cool levels, good controls, lots of unlockable goodies
- Plenty for veterans and newcomers alike to enjoy
- Tomb Raider is no longer just for nerds.

This game had me in pure gaming bliss for three straight days. Here's the breakdown in no particular order:

History
Tomb Raider Anniversary is closely tied with both the original Tomb Raider game as well as, to some extent, the other games in the series, so it is important to understand what made the original great and how the subsequent sequels took its winning formula and took their respective turns stabbing it to death.

The original Tomb Raider had atmosphere, plain and simple. Everything about it was designed to make the player feel isolated. There was almost no music to speak of and few enemies. The music that was there swelled up during important moments to really make the player feel he or she discovered something amazing. Fighting, mostly with animals that had no business being miles underground, was used sparingly only to break up the admittedly repetitive plat-forming. The intelligently designed and interesting levels were divided into four major areas where the end of one level led right into the start of the next, giving the player the feeling of delving deeper and deeper into the earth. These elements all combined to draw players into the tombs and make them feel claustrophobic even in the largest of underground chambers. Regardless of the questionable controls and muddy graphics, the presentation evoked a sense of wonder matched by few other games before or since.

Tomb Raider 2 changed the formula a bit, adding in more human enemies, levels closer to the surface, and an even weirder plot. While still an excellent game, these were the first steps away from the original formula and into the well of crappitude that marred the rest of the series titles under the original development team, Core Design. Tomb Raiders 3, 4, and 5 incrementally took out the good and replaced with drawn out bad. The games featured fewer and fewer tombs in favor of industrial areas and rooftops. Tomb Raider 6 was so unrecognizable and so completely terrible, and had so few actual tombs, that many considered the series completely defunct.

Fast forward to 2006. A new development team, Crystal Dynamics, looked long and hard at what elements of the previous Tomb Raider games had been good and what needed to be changed. The result was Tomb Raider Legend which, while flawed, very successfully revitalized the franchise with a respectable, modern game. Although the level design was generally discrete, simple, and straight-forward, a pretty cool story complemented some fantastic visuals and completely refreshing gameplay that blended the old and the new. It felt like Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, but more responsive and even less constrained. It was good.

Intro
Legend was a technical success, but it still lacked much of the heart and the atmosphere so prevalent in Lara's first outing. In what I can only describe as a stroke of genius, someone at Crystal Dynamics thought it would be a good idea to celebrate Lara's 11th (yeah...?) Anniversary with a complete remake of her first adventure wrapped up in the graphics engine and gameplay that made up the best elements of Legend. That's really the whole premise of Anniversary: Take the core level design, memorable settings, story, characters, and music of the original Tomb Raider and re-imagine them with modern graphics and infinitely better controls. The announcement was a dream come true for many Tomb Raider fans, but the question remained: could Crystal Dynamics pull off the impossible and find a way to include enough fresh new content without ruining the nostalgia for veteran players? The answer, fortunately, is a resounding yes.

Presentation
To begin, the game loads in seconds, the menus are slick and have every necessary option you can think of. The original theme song from Tomb Raider 1 is back as a more modern remix. Although I prefer the tune in its original form, this concept of recognizing old ideas with a new twist aptly sets the theme for the rest of the game.

Level Design
The level design of the original Tomb Raider was one of its many great strengths without which the whole experience would have been tarnished. Anniversary features nearly identical level design concepts with some streamlining and minor changes made to accommodate Lara's new move set. The linked levels are back and to great effect: continuing one level right where the previous one left off is a great tool for making players feel as though they're delving further and further into an ancient tomb. Not every level from the original game made the cut, but the most memorable moments of every level are present. That's the real beauty of it for players familiar with the first game. The levels are absolutely full of "Hey, I remember this room" moments while they also serve up plenty of fresh halls and caverns to explore. Everything is connected in a way that both makes sense and that caters to Lara's newfound athletic nimbleness and extensive move set. The levels are bigger and harder but also, for the most part, less frustrating.

Also of note: the levels in Anniversary, just as they were in the original game, are far less linear than those found in Legend. Most of them consist of one large "hub" room with some kind of locked door and several small offshoot rooms containing puzzles which, when solved, allow Lara to collect one of the keys needed in the hub room. This is exactly how the levels in the original Tomb Raider were set up, and it's a welcome throwback to a time when games didn't hold the players hand at every step.

The levels themselves are also the real enemy of the game. Once the player finds him or herself at the entrance to a new cavern, the hunt begins for anything with which Lara can interact to advance. Indeed, finding your way from point A to point B is the most involving and enjoyable part of the game.

Graphics
Fantastic. Running on a slightly improved (there wasn't much room for improvement) version of the Tomb Raider Legend engine, Anniversary looks just as good and plays just as smoothly on my laptop as it did on my desktop, albeit at a slightly lower resolution. Even at low res with tons of jaggies around the edges, the textures maintain a remarkable level of detail. Even with the settings pumped up the game ran surprisingly well on every machine on which I tested it.

It's not all roses, though. The occasional graphical bug, flickering texture, floating shadow, or clipping problem can and does arise, and once, but only once, the game crashed on me outright. I also had problems minimizing the game and resuming it. Sometimes it worked great, other times it wouldn't come back up, and after killing it manually I could not even start the game back up again without rebooting.

Gameplay
Again, the climbing portions are very reminiscent of the Prince of Persia games, but they are even less constrained and more responsive-feeling. The controls are almost identical to Legend; smooth, responsive, effective, etc. On the combat side, not much has changed in 11 years. You basically whip out your guns, lock onto an enemy, and jump around wildly while shooting until its dead. Combat in Tomb Raider is and always has been an afterthought to serve as a distraction from so much wall crawling and trap dodging, so it doesn't really detract from the overall experience. If there were more fights it would get real old real fast (*cough* Legend *cough*) but luckily that isn't the case. New to Anniversary is the Adrenaline Dodge and accompanying Head Shot, which involves a slow-motion, bullet-time style event requiring a well-timed shot following a well-timed dodge of a charging enemy. It's gimmicky, but it works pretty well, and it adds a much-needed dimension to the otherwise very ordinary combat.

There are some things to note: when you get hit you put away your guns, which is annoying because you lose your current lock. Speaking of lock-on, there are a few control methods, the worst of which being the default, which auto-chooses and auto-switches your target seemingly at random. I prefer the toggle mode, where you pick a target and stick with it, with the ability to manually change your target with a button or, if using a gamepad, as in my case (USB Wired XBOX 360 Controller), a flick of the right analog stick. As you might have guessed, the right analog stick also controls the camera. Oh, the camera...the bane of all 3D games since the first polygons were drawn on a screen. Honestly, the camera in Anniversary isn't half as bad as I wasn't expecting it to be. Yes, it needs constant adjustment with the stick. Yes, it gets stuck in odd places. Yes, it can move on you just as you're about to perform a carefully lined-up jump, sending you into a black pit of oblivion. Yes, when you try to use it to change your lock-on target your view can get completely swung around the wrong way. If you're not used to these kinds of issues with a 3D camera and a dual analog or mouse and keyboard setup by now, you probably don't like games enough to even care. Just as you must navigate first person shooters with two thumbs/hands, it takes both thumbs/hands to keep the camera in the right spot. It's fine. Get over it.

As for the difficulty, well, I died a lot. The traps require some decent timing and a little bit of luck on the part of the camera's behavior, and some of the longer jumps tend to be trial-and-error. Lara's re-imagined world is virtually free of right angles and nice neat squares to use to measure distance, plus she jumps higher if you hold jump longer, so if you're in a rush and jump from the less-than-ideal spot or you forget to hold the button long enough you will probably not make some of the longer jumps. Fortunately, there is a mostly-ok checkpoint system in place and with lightning fast load times it's never really an issue. Also whenever you load a save or a checkpoint, you get full health. You also get full health and full ammo at the start of every level, so there's not much reason to ever use a medkit when you can just kill yourself and try again, so in that respect it's pretty easy. In the original game it was possible to get stuck between a rock and a hard place with an ill-conceived save created just as a creature is attacking you with no health packs.

The save system itself, like many of the other logistics of the game, works well enough but it is far from perfect. It's basically a combination of checkpoints and saves: the non-linear levels are scattered with checkpoints, especially right before and after key puzzles or traps, and the player can save at any time, which basically makes a more permanent snapshot of the most recently crossed checkpoint. Using both of these tools to warp around previously visited areas you can, for the most part, avoid the most annoying aspect of the checkpoint system: getting hurt during some segment, looking for some way to kill yourself to try to make it through unscathed, and crossing a checkpoint in the process. Or, going backwards to check something out with the intent of restoring the last checkpoint in case it turns out to be a wasted trip only to re-cross an old or undesired checkpoint. Most of these problems stem from the non-linearity of the levels, but it doesn't take long to learn that using the save feature frequently can save much headache.

Sound
Absolutely stellar with two very minor complaints: The ambient cave noises that made the first game so atmospheric are back, but they're too quiet by default, at least when compared to the noise of the weapons and occasional music. There are settings to change this though. Secondly, the creepy-ass thumping heart-beat noise present throughout the last few levels in the original game is gone. Otherwise, voices, sound effects, ambient noises, and music that are here are all as close to perfect as it gets. Again, the music is sparse, but it swells up at all the right moments in order to really highlight something in the game. It's brilliant.

Art/Atmosphere
This game will take your breath away. Nothing I can really say will even do it justice. The art direction in Legend, running on the same engine, was hit or miss, but the best parts shined and really showcased the amazing work of which Crystal Dynamics is capable. The art direction wasn't consistent, however. Every level was wildly different than the one before and some types of areas seemed to work better than others. Anniversary takes the art direction to the next level, successfully capturing the essence of the original game and then improving upon it from start to finish. The dullest parts are some twisting, interconnecting caves used to mask loading times, and even those are rife with tiny details of crumbling brick and moss-covered rocks that tell the player that this is a world untouched for centuries. Every single aspect of the game has an incredible level of detail while maintaining the all-important visual atmosphere. Other elements of that atmosphere are also present and accounted for as discussed above, including the level designs, ambient noise and sparse music and enemies. I could go on and on about the atmosphere of this game and others like it but this review is getting lengthy enough. It's simply spot on and that's all that matters.

Lasting Value
It seems like these days more and more people are shying away from a solid single player experience in favor of online games that never end. I for one am a strong believer in quality over quantity, however, and I'll take a short but wonderful single player game over hours upon hours of spamming PT and slaying boars. Luckily, Anniversary has plenty of staying power for those who demand the maximum number of gaming hours for their money. The single player adventure, if you've played the original game, will take about 15 hours, more if you haven't seen some of the major puzzles before. On top of that, the game offers tons of well-hidden items for unlocking a smorgasbord of content. Unlockable outfits from previous, developer commentary, music selection, time trials, and a satisfyingly large and complex (though not quite as intriguing as the one found in Legend "Croft Manor" level are just some of the reasons to keep playing long after the main adventure is complete. There are lots of things to find in these tombs besides the pieces of the Scion.

Summary
When I first heard about Anniversary, I was overjoyed, but I had low expectations. Legend's levels were so discrete and so linear and since they lacked the first game's atmosphere that was so crucial to the experience that I doubted Crystal Dynamics could do the remake the way I wanted them to. I really feared they would take to much of the original's content out in favor of some 21st century hand-holding, which would have ruined it for me. As it turned out, however, this game surpassed my expectations, blew away my doubts, and utterly drew me into its heavily nostalgic world. This is the Tomb Raider the way we remember it. Not as that pixilated, muddy, ugly mess, but as a photorealistic journey spelunking through the lonely ruins of ancient civilizations across the globe. With fantastic visuals, fluid controls, spot-on music and sounds, the same pretty good story, and, best of all, all of the key design elements that made the original game the fantastic game that it was, Tomb Raider Anniversary is Lara's best game yet and one of the greatest adventure games of all time. I recommend it for anyone who likes a great 3rd-person adventure game. Here's hoping for a Tomb Raider 2 remake!

Game Score

A-

Reviewed By: Contributed