20 years have passed since Tomb Raider 2, and a lot has changed.
Not least of all, a fan-made version led by Nicobass that has just had a demo released
for it.
I wish I could have shown this to myself, 20 years ago.
It’s a fantastic example of how far we’ve come, yet at the same time how we can still
value those games we played from our childhood.
Funnily enough, back then there was nothing that I wanted more than to play games from
the future.
But is this remake good?
No.
…IT’S INCREDIBLE!
Sorry about that.
It really is though.
The Playstation 1 games had charm, but were awfully blocky and unappealing to explore
for games that were supposed to be about adventuring.
Not so with this one!
Nicobass has somehow made sense of a lot of the questionable architecture we saw in the
original.
You can even tell that this is the Great Wall of China now!
Every segment of the demo is worthy of a hundred screenshots, lavished in graphical and audio
fidelity that puts all but the rebooted Tomb Raider games to shame.
These last few years I really felt that graphical progress was slowing down but this Unreal
4 remake shows just how far we’ve come.
It’s definitely a good 20 years ahead, even if it is produced by just a few people!
A real testament to the potential that a few talented individuals can have with modern
tools at their fingertips.
Having now played through the demo I can only imagine how difficult the design decisions
must have been.
Like, how to remain faithful to the original while bringing it up to modern standards.
A few key locations you’ll recognise but a lot of the connecting areas, puzzles and
fights are brand new.
And might I say, for the better.
I much prefer the controls, too, which are a lot closer to the modern Tomb Raiders than
they are to the block-based original.
Though I did still die a lot.
Almost always from falling.
The team has made a good effort of highlighting grabbable ledges and the like but these hints
can still get lost within the lavishly detailed environments.
Luckily the checkpoint system is generous and I usually only had to repeat 15 seconds
of gameplay or so every time.
Plus watching Lara’s mangled ragdoll corpse plummet off the mountainside never gets old.
Death seems to be used as a method of learning here.
There are a few time-limited traps where you can’t hope to figure them out first time.
None were too hard once you knew the trick but don’t expect to be observant enough
to spot it first time.
Also, anybody who knows the original level will be bracing themselves for THAT BIT where
the difficulty curve makes a cruel jump.
You know the bit I mean.
And yet, it never came.
This demo decides to take a very different direction at this point, instead becoming
its own thing and dropping the original’s concepts entirely.
I should be happy about this since what we have instead is pretty awesome, but part of
me wanted to be swallowed up by a lizard and shot at by a guy with a ridiculous accent.
I don’t know what I think of the key’s placement, either.
The locked door is a lot sooner in the original and the underwater cave more obvious, making
the key’s obscure placement more forgiveable.
Whereas in this remake you can easily miss it, continuing on through a large part of
the level before finding that you can’t get through the door.
At this point it requires a LOT of backtracking to retrieve it- something none but the most
hardened of Tomb Raider fans will bother doing.
So I guess in that sense this remake is very faithful to games from the 90’s!
Plus the manual save system’s broken right now.
It can only keep one at a time, it seems.
And it’s always one you don’t want it remembering.
The combat is both easier and harder than the original game.
With the original, provided you leapt over the enemy’s head and did those OP 180 degree
rolls repeatedly you could just about defeat anything.
For the remake, it’s nice to have keyboard and mouse movement, as well as OPTIONAL auto-aim,
but you need fast reflexes to dodge the tigers and I would frequently find myself fighting
while trapped in confined spaces where the gameplay felt limited and unfair.
Most of these things are observations rather than criticisms.
I thoroughly enjoyed the experience.
It rewarded me for remembering the original but also threw a load of new sequences into
the mix to keep it fresh.
It’s a true joy to play through it again, now re-envisioned in a level of detail that
we could only have dreamed of back in the day.
He recently announced on Twitter that it was his plan to focus on Croft Manor next, which
I think is a smart decision, as I can’t begin to (40) fathom the work the entire game
would require.
Whatever it becomes, it’s certainly a project that I’ll be keeping an eye on.
Well done!