Review: Tomb Raider Anniversary game

Last year Eidos managed to exhume Lara Croft and breathe new life into the character with the extremely playable and commercially successful Tomb Raider Legends game.

So it’s not surprising the publisher commissioned Crystal Dynamics to develop a follow-up based on the same graphics engine.Technically speaking, this ‘new’ Tomb Raider game isn’t new at all.

This year marks Lara’s 10th birthday and Tomb Raider Anniversary is essentially a remastered version of the game that started it all.

On paper it may not sound particularly appealing – playing through a 10-year-old game that you may well have found confounding the first time around. In fact, Crystal Dynamics has done more than just scrub up the graphics a little.

The game appears to have been totally rebuilt. Some of the puzzles remain and you may recognise the occasional enemy, for instance – but many of the environments have been expanded and most challenges tweaked.

More importantly, Lara herself benefits greatly from improvements implemented in the Legends engine – specifically the way she controls and handles – making some of the climbing and platforming sections less frustrating than in the original.

The advantages of all the extra polygons, pixels and processing power are evident throughout. Anniversary is a great-looking game even by modern standards, from the dark tombs to Lara’s famously physics-defying character model. There’s also effective use of audio, including the voice of actress Keely Hawes who reprises her role as Lara.

Occasional camera quirks and questionable combat experience aside, Tomb Raider Anniversary is surprisingly successful and we’d recommend it to anyone with a soft spot for Ms Croft.