Tomb Raider Remastered
Total Playtime: 22.6 Hours
Tomb Raider 1 + Unfinished Business Playtime: 22.6 Hours, finished 10 November 2025.
Tomb Raider 2 + Golden Mask Playtime: 25.5 Hours, finished 20 June 2026.
I'm playing through the remastered Core Design Tomb Raider games (I-VI) on the Steam Deck, which were released in 2 separate trilogy collections (I-III, IV-VI); for the first 3 games, this includes the main levels of each game alongside a number of expansion or bonus levels. I'm using modern controls since the old tank controls really don't work for me; parts of the game can feel a bit finnicky but I've adapted to it fairly quickly, and they felt quite natural a few hours into TR1.
It might be worth noting that I'm certainly not good at these games, so I'm heavily [ab]using reference maps and some other notes provided on Stella's TR Site to get all the collectibles & pickups I can find. This ended up being a great help for some of the tougher sections near the end of TR1, so I imagine I'll be doing the same thing for the rest of the series. Plus, finding out how to actually platform to get some of the secrets or pickups was still very fun in itself ;)
Given that each game is quite long in its own right, I imagine that I'll handle this collection similarly to the DOOM rerelease, maybe spreading the games out over a few years so I don't burn out.
Tomb Raider 1
Once upon a time, I tried playing the original version of this on Steam and gave up probably less than 15 minutes in because I could not get the hang of the tank controls for the life of me. I literally died to the first group of wolves in the game because I couldn't wrap my head around slowly rotating to hit them or to move around. On that front, the remaster made the game infinitely more playable for me by giving my monkey brain a more familar control scheme; being able to directly control Lara just feels so much better in all the precision platforming segments to me. There are a number of tradeoffs for sure - more intricate combat maneuvers were hard for me to wrap my head around, and trying to do a backwards ledgegrab involved a pretty inconsistent roll that just as often as not made her jump straight to her death. However, by the end of the game (+ expansion), I felt quite comfortable with it, and never felt like there was anything I absolutely could not do with this control scheme.
Outside of the updated control scheme, the most obvious change is in the visuals; every texture and model was completely redone to turn a game made in the mid-1990s into one that doesn't look out of place for the modern era. Realistically, I'd say it probably looks mid-2010s in terms of fidelity, but the aesthetic is fantastic and it runs beautifully on the Steam Deck. I really like the way Lara and the other characters look in this game; they feel quite faithful to the originals, and recreate in a 3D model the character represented in original renders and artwork. On top of that, you can actually swap freely between the new graphics and the old with the press of a button, which actually was very useful at various points when lighting or textures in one version made things too dark or unclear to see. This was probably also another limitation forcing the overall fidelity of the graphics to look a bit more "dated" - the new graphics are necessarily still bound by the blocky geometry of the original game.
The gameplay definitely leans far more heavily into platforming and exploration than combat. This is especially true in the first half of the game, enemy counts are quite low per level, and AI is incredibly simple and easy to cheese. Most of the melee-only enemies are stymied as soon as you climb onto any kind of platform, giving you free license to pump them full of lead from your bottomless pistols. Meanwhile, the importance of clean movement is stressed early and often; the second or 3rd level (with the T-Rex boss) has a maximum-distance long jump ledge grab that requires very precise timing. Even in the later game & expansions where the aggressive Atlanteans and Centaurs make combat a bit more miserable, ranged attacks can still be countered with repeated left-right side jumps. Plenty of secrets and other tough sequences make full use of the limits of the movement system as well.
Overall, I really liked this game! It's nice to know that my initial interest in this game was well-founded; this kind of feels like proto-Uncharted given the similar themes and overall gameplay. The emphasis on very precisely-designed puzzles and secrets is overall a better and more engaging structure to me than Uncharted's big scenes and yellow climbing tape. The later levels with lots of mutants did get a bit grating, which carried over into the first 2 levels of Unfinished Business as well, but the sort of nightmarish flesh textures were an interesting and unexpected theme. In any case, I'm looking forward to the 2nd game (and the 3rd, 4th, 5th, and 6th...) the next time I open up this collection!
Tomb Raider 2
For the most part, TR2 is basically just more of the same with a number of incremental improvements, and a number of silly new mechanics that don't really redefine the experience. The main game's story is now based around some random Italian's cult muscling their way into a hidden temple somewhere in China, where a mystical dagger can be used to transform the wielder into a dragon if they stab themselves. Lara chases down this threat by following this would-be Mussolini to Venice, then an offshore oil rig with undersea operations, and a temple in the Tibet highlands, before finally landing back in China where everything comes to a head. The cutscenes are cool, but actual context for the story events is sparse as usual so the game feels mostly like an action movie.
Mechanically, usable vehicles are the biggest addition; speedboats make an appearance in Italy, and Tibet introduces you to the snowmobile. They're a bit clunky and don't feel essential to the feel of the game, but they do honestly come in handy for some traversal of more difficult terrain. I found it kind of funny that the snowmobile has 2 variants, one with turbo and a second with mounted machine guns, which allows for some pretty interesting fights. Also, I felt like this game had a much greater emphasis on water sections; several levels (particularly in the 2nd part of the game, oil platform / underwater wreck) focus entirely around it, there are several new enemy types, including sharks, that were added to make them a bit more dangerous, and the harpoon gun was added specifically to give Lara (and enemy divers) a weapon that could work while submerged. Lastly, flares were added to allow for darker areas and more obscured corners - having to hold them makes for an interesting tradeoff, since you have to drop them to shoot at enemies that come out of the dark.
I noticed a really big shift towards more combat-heavy gameplay in TR2; while many levels in the original TR1 could barely break 20 enemies, almost all levels in TR2 have over 30 at minimum, with a few levels reaching as high as into the 60s! I don't think the enemy counts continue to rise this rapidly further into the series, but I found that I was using my weapons much more than before. It's a good thing that the weapon selection was expanded: new to TR2 are the M16, Grenade Launcher, and Harpoon Gun. The M16 rifle gives Lara a solid high-damage, long range weapon for sniping enemies, with the downside that she can't flip around with it easily. I found myself using this a lot, since it chews through the beefier enemies. The grenade launcher feels a bit finnicky, but it's super powerful and has a massive splash that can destroy enemies very quickly. It also allows for an extremely easy cheese tactic on the final boss (Dragon), where you can kill it by getting it stuck behind a pillar and dumping just a few grenades into it. Finally, the harpoon gun is not great - it's the only weapon in the game to use clips (?) and a reload mechanic, and the slow projectiles & low damage usually make it simply more viable to get out of the water and bait waterborne enemies close enough to kill with conventional weaponry.
Most of the game was great fun, about on par with my experience of TR1. However, I found myself getting a bit frustrated near the end of the game due to some more annoying levels (specifically, the Temple of Xian); this also reflected my experience with the Atlantis levels of TR1. That said, I didn't feel like I was burning out completely, and the Golden Mask levels were great fun, even if they're just a collection of 4 new "normal" levels and nothing that pushed the grain too much. The secret level, "Nightmare in Vegas", was great fun though. Lara's goofy leopard-pattern outfit and all the shenanigans around a gaudy hotel were a fun end to the game. Ultimately, I feel like my thoughts of this game don't amount to much of any real substance, but I can say that I'm looking forward to TR3!
