You know what I love about the current crop of
remastered games and games from the
days gone by coming over to the Android and mobile platforms?
What I love about it is it's like coming full circle for me.
Many of these games I reviewed right at the beginning of my career
and so today we're taking a look at Tomb Raider
on Android. Yes, Tomb Raider, one of
THE classic titles of the mid 90s
brought across in full glory onto
Android. Now it has to be said
that when Tomb Raider was first released I was in a minority of
reviewers who felt the game was great. It was certainly groundbreaking for the
time,
but some of those issues still ring true today.
For instance the control scheme. It was awful in the nineties
and it's still awful today. Here on Android it hasn't been improved.
Essentially this is a game that was made really for D-pads
as opposed to analogue sticks and so
the control scheme when played with a controller on Android it just feels far too
heavy and cumbersome.
There is no finesse here to the movement at all. Ultimately you end up getting
stuck on walls an
awful lot of the time, having to back up to
try and turn yourself a couple of degrees to then move forward again.
This becomes especially challenging when trying to pull things like levers
where you have to be perfectly in front of them in order to trigger the action.
With that said though, the game
is looking beautiful even in its very polygonic
glory. Here we can really see the triangles making up
every aspect of the character models. It's almost like stepping back in time
in many many ways. The audio
is just as it was originally. That means
atmospherically there's some really great stuff going on here,
the echoey drops and drips going on within the cave systems for instance.
But on the flip side some of the repetitive noises
for instance for the bats or the hounds start to grate
after a while just as they did with the original game. The cutscenes
aren't looking so hot any more being of a very low resolution taken from the
original FMV files by the looks of it. Now
this does mar the presentation slightly. It would have been nice if these assets
maybe had been re-done
specifically for the mobile release but as a title that is costing just 99p
maybe we shouldn't expect too much there. The actual in-game graphics look
fantastic at
1080p on the Nvidia Shield tablet and there's even controller support here
but just bear in mind that the original controls were very clunky
and as such that transfers directly one-to-one on whatever control scheme you decide to
use,
be it controller or be it on-screen controls. It doesn't quite feel as fluid as we've
been used to
over the last few years, which is to be expected in many respects.
This is the original 3d adventure game
and as such it really does rely on the original layouts
and the starchiness that we used to have from those old controllers.
It just isn't as fluid as it could be. All in all
this is a wonderful trip down memory lane. If you didn't like Tomb Raider
originally
you're probably not going to like Tomb Raider on mobile, it is the same game
after all. However, if you're looking for
a little trip of nostalgia then Tomb Raider for 99p on Android is well worth picking
up. If you've never played the Tomb Raider games before, or if you've
only played the more recent reimagining then it's fun to go back and see where
it all started
to literally take a trip back into the game
industry's earliest times when 3d was still a brand new thing
and graphics cards like 3dfx were just coming onto the market.
This is the birth of three-dimensional accelerated graphics
right here in Tomb Raider and even with its flaws
stretching back over the eons it is still a fun game
and still a watershed moment.