Lara Croft started raiding tombs nearly 30 years ago, is her first adventure worth a replay today?
What Is It? Lara Croft was an early face of the PlayStation console. Her looks, including her notoriously laughable proportions, were a major attention grabber at the time. This led many, many people to the original Tomb Raider game. What did they find when they got there? And what might you find if you play it nearly 30 years later?
The game is billed as a 3D action-adventure game which makes sense on the surface. You run through areas in 3D space, wielding various sets of guns, mowing down creatures, solving puzzles, and traversing various terrain. I will steal a line from a Bluesky friend, however, and say that Tomb Raider is actually a puzzle game, not action-adventure.
The combat in this game is okay. The guns, thankfully, auto-aim, so shooting enemies is fairly simple and effective. However, the best course of action for almost every encounter is to stand somewhere where the enemy can’t reach you and shoot down on them until they’re gone. This isn’t always possible, and that’s when the stronger weapons (which are extremely well hidden) come into play. You do not want to find yourself in close-quarters combat in Tomb Raider, it is a downright bad experience of not being able to move quickly enough to dodge and constantly facing the wrong direction.
On the adventure side of things, you will spend time working on puzzles and trying to navigate Lara across various ledges. The former often involves a lot of block pushing and lever pulling. Nothing groundbreaking today, but still remains fun enough. Navigating Lara is, in my opinion, the high point of this game and the reason I was hooked on playing it 29 years after release.
Every piece of terrain in the game is the same size block. You will learn how to maneuver Lara to the perfect spots on any given block to pull off the various types of jumps you might need. You will also learn to predict what types of jumps are required. There is a certain sense of satisfaction that is hard to explain when you are on the last level and can quickly identify a jump that is too close for a running jump but too far to land a flat-footed jump so you line up flat-footed and hold X to grab the ledge and pull yourself up.
The game doesn’t really hold up as action-adventure because any time you are forced to run it is painful. Don’t even think about needing to run and jump. The combat, particularly in later levels, is very bad.
The game does hold up surprisingly well if you can get satisfaction out of figuring out how to navigate the jumps, walks, side-steps, rolls, falls, and everything else perfectly to get Lara to the next area.
The Best Part: There is something quietly addicting to the precision required to navigate Lara between ledges. That, ultimately, is the crux of this game and what you’ll spend much of your time on. The learning curve of knowing to walk to an edge, then step backwards to provide yourself the exact amount of time required to pull off a running jump seems kind of dull, but in practice lining up the character and pulling off the exact button presses needed to advance, often with the threat of instant death waiting for a failure, is really no different than many puzzle games.
The Worst Part: Combat. Combat is mostly pretty fun but near the end when the enemies start lobbing flaming (?) projectiles at you which take a big chunk of your health, it becomes apparent how bad the system is. This is mainly the fault of tank controls as it is difficult to run and gun, but also you are mostly working in tight spaces so even once you do get a grasp on run and gun, there often isn’t any room to do so.
The Verdict: Tomb Raider has to be in the running for the most PlayStation 1 game on the PlayStation 1. It was released fairly early in the console’s run and showcased both the power and the “we still have a lot to figure out” aspects of the console. It’s a great idea for a game and pulls off much of it surprisingly well, but if you aren’t in the mood for a very specific type of challenge, you will likely bounce off of this one rather quickly.
How to Play: PS1, Saturn, N-Gage, MS-DOS, iOS, Android. Remaster: PS4/5, Switch, XSX/S
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