Crystal Dynamics deliver a gorgeous remake of the original Tomb Raider with Legend's modern feel. The puzzles weave stone and water, the sublime exploration keeps its magic, and Lara regains a near-timeless grace on 360.
Your verdict
Category
Action Adventure1 player16+
Description
Action-adventure by Crystal Dynamics and Eidos, October 2007. Lara Croft revisits her origins finding her missing father and uncovering the Atlantean artefact mystery. Original 1996 Tomb Raider gameplay recreated with modern graphics, improved platforming and combat and hidden secrets. Modernised adaptation of the franchise's founding episode.
Lara Croft Tomb Raider - Anniversary review
4/5
Art direction
★★★★★
"Striking"
4/5
Music
★★★★★
"Excellent"
4/5
Story
★★★★★
"Captivating"
The final third breaks with stone: Atlantis is no longer a temple but an organism, veined walls of flesh that pulse, damp tunnels lined with membranes, cocoons from which unfinished creatures emerge. After hours of dry mineral and carved columns, this shift into the organic produces an unease the 1996 game could only suggest.
The themes written by Nathan McCree in 1996 return to the foreground: the four-note motif tied to Lara, then laid out on a handful of electronic instruments, is here entrusted to a full orchestra, with harp and low strings. Recognizing the melody under its new clothing is part of the design, and players from the era place it from the first bar.
The remake adds what the original left unsaid: Jacqueline Natla manipulates Lara from beginning to end, and the first killing of a human being, settled in one second of panic, leaves a mark the following cutscenes do not erase. Beneath the Egyptian and Peruvian expedition, then, plays out the story of a young woman discovering what her profession demands of her.
