Tomb Raider IV-VI Remastered | Review

Győző "FairyEmpire" BakiFebruary 27, 2025Last Updated: February 26, 2025

0 9 minutes read

After Aspyr brought us the somewhat uneven, yet much welcome remasters of the first 3 Tomb Raider games, it’s time to look at the next batch of 3 games – from 4 to 6, which are a set of rather controversial episodes. Do the games hold up? Were they improved upon enough in this remaster? Let’s find out in our review for Tomb Raider IV-VI Remastered on Xbox Series X!

The death of Lara Croft

This may seem like a bizarre header in hindsight, given how many Tomb Raider games, movies, comics and so forth have come out about Lara Croft’s adventures in the last two decades. Yet, Lara Croft’s fate was as uncertain as ever, and there was a legitimate risk of the franchise disappearing for good. Coming from the bombastic success of the first Tomb Raider game by British studio Core Design, publisher Eidos realized how crucial this franchise is for their future, with many of their other titles not selling particularly well. This meant that, before long, the development of the Tomb Raider games became a two-team project of sorts – with a more experienced bunch leading the, so to speak, bigger projects, and a less experienced group focusing on some stepping stone sequels inbetween. Eidos wanted a new Tomb Raider every year, and this was the compromise chosen to deliver. With all these games releasing primarily on PlayStation 1, the technical knowledge was already there, it was all about churning out more content.

The previous remaster trilogy ended on Tomb Raider III: a relatively unambitious but fondly remembered globe-trotting adventure with relentless difficulty spikes, and a game done by said less experienced developer team. As you may have guessed, this was done so that the main team could focus on the transformative fourth game: Tomb Raider IV, subtitled The Last Revelation. An improved graphics engine, with much more detailed polygons, more believeable animations, with even Lara receiving a handful of new moves to her arsenal. After a cool playable flashback with young Lara, serving as a convenient tutorial, a journey much more reminiscent of the first game begins, as she accidentally frees an ancient god in Egypt. One memorable change in this chapter was the presence of interconnected levels and so-called hub stages, connecting multiple other areas that, in previous games, would have been completely separate levels that can no longer be accessed once finished. This largely increased the variety and depth of puzzles too, with several very innovative ideas. Overall, Tomb Raider IV is one of the highest points in the franchise, yet a bit of franchise fatigue was kicking in – not just for the fans, but the developers too, who really wanted to move on to something different and stop crunching on yearly Tomb Raider games. So, initially unbeknownst to Eidos, Core Design slipped in a dramatic ending: the death of Lara Croft.

Lara died, but she survived

Needless to say, Eidos didn’t flinch, and immediately greenlit not one, but two more sequels, following the structure of the last 2 projects. A less experienced team working on a more iterative fifth game, meant to be a send-off to the 5th generation consoles, with the big shots starting development on the 6th game, targeting the much more powerful PlayStation 2. Let’s look at the fifth game, the somewhat controversial Tomb Raider: Chronicles. The game opens with a funeral scene, as a lot of people showed up in this rainy day to commemorate the fallen British archeologist. As people remember her adventures, the players get to play through various prior journeys she’s had – both inspired by actual locations visited in previous games, and also a handful of new ones. From familiar jungles, all the way down to creepy horroristic forests and even a high-tech environment, Lara’s fifth adventure is as formulaic as it gets. No real plot to speak of, tons of rehashed ideas, no meaningful technical improvements from IV – in fact, the level and puzzle design seem to have regressed to III’s often needlessly convoluted style, with none of the multi-stage action of the fourth episode either. Chronicles is for the hardcore fans, nobody else will realistically bother playing through this one.

With the original run of five, 5th generation console games ending here, it’s time to look at how these were remastered – as the 6th game, Angel of Darkness, is a completely different tech that needs its own analysis a bit later. In short: Aspyr’s remastering philosophy remained fundamentally the same as in Tomb Raider I-III Remastered. The original menus and visual presentation remains intact, though the actual game elements received a glow up. Much higher resolution textures, more detailed models (for Lara, especially), but with still the classic “blocky” structure and feel of each level. A handful of geometry changes can be found in certain places, but for the most part, it’s virtually identical, with the higher resolution textures seemingly using an AI technique. No new content was added to either game, but a new control method has been introduced to both, with players being able to use proper analog inputs to move, as opposed to having to manually strafe and line up every jump like in the old days. It feels slightly more modern this way, but these games’ controls still feel rather archaic. Fun, but objectively outdated. Do expect all the classic features intact at least, including the cheat codes.

The Croft legacy, cast onto a new generation

After the somewhat disappointing sales and weak critical reception to the unimpressive Chronicles, a chapter that wasn’t meaningfully altered by this remaster either, Eidos was starting to feel the heat. As mentioned, plenty of other franchises of theirs weren’t generating enough money, so the success of Tomb Raider could determine the entire publisher’s survival. No wonder then that the first PS2 installment of the franchise (though it was also day one on PC) was a huge deal – Core Design had to make an infinitely more advanced engine, revolutionize the game systems, do something that really reignites the hype and passion around Lara Croft adventures. For a long time, the 6th game was dubbed Tomb Raider: Next Generation, with many gaming magazines showing shockingly high fidelity renders and screenshots of this upcoming, transformative chapter. As someone deeply invested in gaming magazines at the time, let me tell you: it can’t be understated how big of a deal this new Tomb Raider was going to be, and what hype surrounded the seemingly incredible tech underneath. Eidos was serious about it, and this game was supposed to be the start of a whole new trilogy.

The PlayStation 2 launched right around the time Chronicles came out, so Core Design wasn’t going to make launch with Next Generation, with 2002 as the target. A complicated development brought a handful of delays all the way into 2003, with Eidos eventually issuing an ultimatum. Next Generation eventually became The Angel of Darkness, and what was supposed to be the start of a new wave of Lara Croft adventures almost became the mess that murdered the entire franchise. On a quick glance, the tech has vastly improved. Lara Croft’s model features a crazy amount of detail now, the animations are more detailed than ever, the gaming worlds far more believeable and visually complex than ever. But two other, much worse aspects stand out: it was a clearly unfinished game, and an often terribly frustrating and glitchy one at that. I still remember buying this one in a gaming store for PC back in the day, with my sister who was an even bigger fan of these games than I was. We rushed home to install it and start the adventure, but the game’s numerous problems didn’t take long to materialize. This game wasn’t good, and one could argue it barely even resembles a Tomb Raider. A mess that had disastrous consequences for the Tomb Raider series as a whole.

She didn’t die, but her franchise almost did

Reviews back in the day, but also some of your favourite gaming youtubers abundantly covered Angel of Darkness, an infamously messy and unfinished game at its launch. There’s a laundry list of issues, but let’s look at the facts first. Lara’s accused in a murder she seemingly didn’t commit, even though it’s unclear to her what happened, and her hands are literally covered in the blood of his old mentor, Werner Von Croy. This starts a different kind of adventure for Lara, as she’s now stuck in Paris (at first, anyway) with a mysterious artifact to find, but this time, with cops wanting to capture her. This immediately poses two problems. The first, is that for the vast majority of the game, Lara is exploring buildings, small streets, and not interesting, exotic and vast locations. The other, is how the constant presence of cops, but even all sort of bad guys, cranks up the action – and to be frank, the action in this game is really clunky and unfun, even more clunky than the already not great shooting and combat in prior titles. The level design is very convoluted, with lots of backtracking, needlessly complicated platform segments (made even worse by a baffling stamina meter and unreactive controls alike), with the busy visual style often hiding key things to interact with.

The game also tries to be an RPG of sorts, with various characters to interact with, choosable dialogue options, items to buy from shops and so forth, but it’s done in an extremely rudimental way. Perhaps the most baffling part of this is how Lara does not have stat points to spend, as you’d have in most RPGs, but there’s still an in-game “power level” tied to… rather stupid actions. Move a certain crate, climb a certain ladder, and out of nowhere, Lara will claim she feels stronger now, which in turn will allow her to do a task that was just outside of her power range before. You’d think this is tied to an XP bar or something, but no, it happens in specific locations and events, regardless of how much stuff you did before. The original game also had a ludicrous amount of bugs, audio cutting out, missing textures, continuity errors, cut content and whatnot – something this remaster, to everyone’s legit surprise, tries to actually fix. To an extent, anyway.

Polishing helps

Angel of Darkness is, out of the 6 Tomb Raider games remastered thus far, the game that most needed improvements. For all the flaws of the previous games, each of them felt like a pretty complete, relatively stable, not particularly buggy or janky experience. Angel of Darkness had various areas cut from the game for its original release, many of which have been restored – including an extra area in the opening Paris streets already. The controls have also been made a bit more snappy, Lara’s iconic double pistols have been restored instead of the bizarre choice of a single one, on top of several bugfixes, continuity errors, dialogue clean-ups and whatnot. It is evidently the best way to play what is, unfortunately, still the worst Tomb Raider game to date. Even the graphics got a nice glow up, especially Lara’s model, though many other models remained the same. As opposed to the AI-centric remastering of other games, this one feels a bit more deliberate, with various manual changes that
better evoke what the developers wanted to do, not what they actually did.

Once again, however, a few areas remain where the original look is somehow superior, due to changes in lightning that don’t favour the visuals all that much. Still, the 6th Tomb Raider’s remastering job is by far the most impressive of the bunch, and it’s recently been revealed that Aspyr even worked with various modders who have been working on fixing the game unofficially before. This is, of course, still not enough to turn the infamous Angel of Darkness into a great Tomb Raider, or even a great videogame in general, but it’s the closest we may ever get to one. My hope is that these remasters don’t end here, and that we’ll get a new trilogy with Legend, Anniversary and Underworld next – 3 games from the 7th generation of consoles by new developer Crystal Dynamics, a coherent trilogy that placed the franchise back on the map after the last titles tanked its reputation.

A solid preservation of games not many asked for

Whereas many people had tons of nostalgia for the three games restored in Tomb Raider I-III Remastered, the next three games are certainly a lot less fondly remembered. IV is a great return to form with a lot of smart improvements to the formula, but V is an uninspired collection of things we’ve already seen and outdated level designs. And then, of course, the infamous Angel of Darkness, a cursed game that nearly destroyed the entire franchise. Aspyr’s remastering philosophy remained for IV and V, seemingly using plenty of AI upscaling and manual changes alike, though not much was meaningfully altered or improved upon in the end, barring the new control scheme. Angel of Darkness, on the other hand, has seen a lot of bugs fixed, unfinished content being restored and more, thanks to the help of the very modders who have been fixing the game all these years on PC. Ultimately, while the quality of the games in this package is varied, with so being the effort going into the actual remastering process too, this is hardly an essential purchase. It is however a package that is nice for hardcore fans of the franchise, but also those who want to rediscover the most advanced classic Tomb Raider (IV, that is), the bizarre piece of gaming history that is Angel of Darkness… and also Tomb Raider V, I guess. Sometimes, even missable games are worth a solid remaster.