Following on the success of Tomb Raider 1-3 Remastered earlier this year, Aspyr is set to follow up with another overhauled trilogy of Lara Croft adventures. Tomb Raider 4-6 Remastered is set to arrive on Steam on February 14, 2025.
The new trilogy will feature updated versions of the mainline Tomb Raider games The Last Revelation (1999), Chronicles (2000), and The Angel of Darkness (2003). The remastered games will include updated graphics and controls (with an option to play in the original style if you so prefer), health bars for bosses, a photo mode, achievements, and other upgrades.
The original remastered trilogy is very good: Our chief complaint about it was that it was a little too true to the original in some ways, like irritating ambient audio effects, not-great AI, basic gunplay, and a sometimes-uncooperative camera. It'll be interesting to see if that commitment to the old-time experience carries over to the same extent in Tomb Raider 4-6 Remastered because the final part of that trilogy, Angel of Darkness—to put it bluntly—really sucked.
I don't have a link to our original review from 2003—the PC Gamer website as it currently exists didn't exist back then—but according to Metacritic we called it "infuriating, buggy, and ultimately boring" in our October print review. More recently, we described it as "the game that almost killed the series" in a retrospective look at the game that can be nicely summed up with this conclusion: "When Eidos took this series out of Core's hands, it wasn't engaged in executive meddling. It was doing the world a public service."
The big challenge facing Aspyr with this remaster is that while bugs can be fixed, you can't patch fundamentally crappy gameplay. And that was the real issue with The Angel of Darkness: Sure, it was a technical mess, but the design and mechanics are what really made it such a memorable experience (and not in a good way, to be clear): When your underlying design inspires lines like "Tears of stupidity continue to fall," man, you've got some work to do.
Or maybe not. It's been 20 years, after all, and maybe nostalgia will carry it far enough that players at least won't hold it against Aspyr. It's possible they'll even like it now, although given our recent replay, that seems somewhat less than likely. The smartest move might be for developers to treat it as a historical curiosity, perhaps with some kind of pre-play message like you sometimes see ahead of old racist Looney Tunes cartoons: "Yeah, it sucks, but this is what it was in 2003." And if nothing else, at least this time around, you were warned.
