Tomb Raider: Anniversary video game review

Here's what you need to know; things are about to get interesting in the life of famed archaeologist and adventurer Lara Croft as she is employed by the mysterious Jaqueline Natla to hunt down an ancient relic, the Scion of Atlantis. But as Lara follows the breadcrumbs in search of the various pieces of the Scion, it becomes apparent that she's not the only one under Natla's employ looking for it, and that Natla's true intentions with the relic maybe something far more sinister.
If it wasn't apparent, I've begun to play the Tomb Raider games again thanks to Shadow of the Tomb Raider. But having blasted through the entire reboot trilogy in a week, in the wrong order mind you, I figured I'd see if I could get my hands on some of the older games, mainly Tomb Raider: Anniversary, one of the first games I got for my PSP. So imagine my excitement when I stumbled across Tomb Raider: Anniversary and Legend on the Xbox Live Store for £15 a pop. Not arsed to hunt down my PS2 copy or rummage in Hanley's second-hand media stores, I decided the price was worth it, if only to see if my fondness for this game is founded in anything more than mere nostalgia, but fast forward ten hours and I'm still not entirely sure.

Coming off the heels of the reboot, it really didn't take long for me to notice a few things, things that the two series' have in common, and things they couldn't do more differently. Easily the biggest difference from a story perspective is the focus the two games put on their stories, because Anniversary doesn't do that. Tomb Raider Anniversary's story could probably be explained from beginning to end in a single sentence, it adheres admirably to the story of the original game on which its built, but the game did change a few things here and there. This served as a bit of an eye opener as to just how far games have come in the decades; I remember playing these simpler kind of games back in the PS1 and PS2 days of my childhood, as well as games like Ridge Racer and Pacman World, two games I also played a crap load of on the PSP, incidentally. Since the older, simpler times of the PSP and PS2 however, gaming has changed, become bigger, sexier, more cinematic, games now tell huge, epic stories to rival and even surpass Hollywood's biggest blockbusters, with production and marketing budgets to match. Tomb Raider received this treatment with the reboot, becoming a harrowing, thrilling adventure of self-discovery and baddie killing, but to go back to this game and see the difference is quite the shock.

The story follows a very basic and predictable pattern; Lara goes to an exotic, dangerous place and finds a piece of the Scion, she has a confutation with a cheesy but incredibly charismatic henchman, repeat until the Scion is assembled, then the betrayal is revealed and Lara has to save the world. It's as straightforward a tale as you can get, its characters are completely one dimensional but, again, dripping with charisma, and deeper meanings, what even are they? There are moments where the game dabbles a bit with deeper ideas; conundrums of obsession, guilt and desire, but then the game moves on. For example, when Lara kills one of the Henchmen, the game does a good job of expressing her feeling of guilt, of disgust, she isn't a killer, but this isn't a component of some larger ark, this is in the game's final level. The positive of this is that the game feels very casual, its tone is relatively light hearted and cheesy, but the downside is the dearth of emotional depth. The characters are charming and silly and fun to watch, but they're also cartoonish, simple, rather symbolically of the game as a whole, it's not going to scare or intrigue you because that's not the motive, it's just a simple, wholesome treasure hunt with a globetrotting hero and a gang of frenemies all playing cat and mouse with each other.

The simplicity and archaic charm carries over to the gameplay, of course, most notably in the combat which takes a back seat to the puzzling for the entire game. Combat couldn't be simpler; you have four buttons, target lock, shoot, jump and roll, aiming is automatic and essentially all enemies in the game use exclusively melee attacks, making it your job to not get bitten or clawed while pumping them full of lead. This task will get progressively harder as the enemies start hitting faster, requiring you to git gud, and in the game's later stages they grow wings and start throwing fireballs at you, but the principle is the same. There really isn't much to this system outside of learning when to dodge, there is also a function where you can enrage enemies, which allows you to enter a sort of bullet time mode where you can instakill them with a headshot, but as far as I can work out this happens randomly, and the instakill is as simple as waiting for the crosshair to lock on an enemy's face. This makes combat the least memorable part of the game, even as you unlock new guns like the Shotgun and the SMG's, neither of which really change the combat compared to the standard, infinite ammo pistols, they just kill things faster. There is also a startling lack of combat throughout the game; enemies never come in groups bigger than five or six and they're spread thin throughout the levels, which would have worked better if they posed more of a threat, but they don't.

The one exception, and it's a very good exception, is the boss fights, which play out less like a boss fight and more like a really, really, dangerous puzzle. The bosses aren't just bullet sponges like the rest of the enemies, they can only be hurt with certain attacks, or they can only be hurt with the environment, and this is where the combat becomes awesome, because when viewed as puzzles, these fights are this game at its best. You could waste your time shooting at the boss, or you could realise that his weapon has an anchor point for the grappling hook on it, or that there are environmental hazards that you can use to your advantage, things like this that make the boss fights probably the most fun parts of the game, at least for me, I particularly like the Centaur boss because of how clever it is and the T Rex boss because Dinosaurs. Had the grunt enemies been more like this, more threatening and requiring solving how to kill them, I'd have probably loved this game's combat, but as it stands, its functional but rudimentary and the boss fights are wicked.

The combat took a back seat to the puzzling, so much so that puzzling makes up most of the gameplay, but is the puzzling good, yes and no. The good; some of the puzzles are really well designed, they get the noggin joggin' and it's satisfying to finally crack the code. Most of the puzzles don't take the piss that much, though some of them undeniably do, the game never really finds a good balance in my opinion, for every puzzle that's really clever and satisfying to solve, there's another somewhere that'll have you stumped for ten minutes because the solution doesn't seem to make sense. The puzzles do start to fall into a pattern as well, as you enter a room, find that a certain number of a certain object is missing, and have to sniff around the level looking for them and solving their respective puzzles. At one point it's keys, then it's bars of metal, then it's Ankhs, then it's an Ankh, an Eye of Horus, a scarab, and whatever the last one was, but the formula for all of them is the same; a central room with key holes, and a door or series of doors that hold the keys. It does have the effect of making the game feel repetitive, especially when you notice that even though the game's four locales all look completely different, they play exactly the same as one another, which, points for consistency I suppose, the game doesn't change, it just gets harder, but again, there isn't really a good balance in the puzzles, some are easy, some are perfect, and some are ridiculous.

The bad; the game is insufferably inconsistent at times with its controls. Remember how I said in my review of the reboot that sometimes Lara did the wrong action and I wasn't sure if it was me or the game, that happens literally dozens of times in this game; Lara isn't auto grabbing for ledges or missing jumps she should have made, meanwhile she's making jumps that seem impossible, ledge dropping is a headache because Lara can crouch with ten toes over the edge, and rope swinging can die in a fire. I never had to cheat on a puzzle, but I lost count of the number of times I had to consult a YouTube playthrough, not for help on the puzzle, but to check if I was even playing the game right because the path you're supposed to take is so counterintuitive. Rope swinging in particular really annoyed me because of how finicky it is; you have to dismount the swing at the perfect time and from the perfect angle or else you'll fall to your death, but the speed and angle are both affected by the camera, which affects direction of movement and has a mind of its own sometimes. You also have to jump off the wall at the apex of a swing and grab a parallel wall sometimes, good luck figuring that out, and if there's other anchor points nearby, Lara will even grapple them instead of the one she's supposed to, which is just dandy. The controls are so finicky and ledge grabbing and jumping so inconsistent and counterintuitive, and this happens far, far too many times to be just me.

Sometimes to understand your present, you have to go back to your past
So is Tomb Raider: Anniversary what I remember it being from my younger years; yes and no. Yes in the sense that it's a relic of an older time in gaming, its design is archaic, but charmingly so in some ways, its story is light and wholesome, its characters are archetypal but charming, and I can't help but smile in the game's cutscenes because of that charm. No in the sense that the gameplay varies from charmingly archaic in its combat and level design, to frustratingly so in its navigation and controls. The game has some great boss fights and some nicely designed puzzles. but the combat is also surface level and not special, and navigation is so counterintuitive and fiddly that I at times didn't even know if I was doing it right, which I found very annoying. Whether or not I'd recommend this game is a tricky one because I want to love it, because it holds a very nostalgic place in my heart and because it does have its merits, but in the shadow of the reboot trilogy the game feels antiquated in some bad ways too. Overall though, I'd say it's a pretty fine game, not remarkably good or bad, its fine, and maybe if you want a trip down memory lane, a window into the past as I did, it's worth playing.