3.5/5 ★ – carpenkinda428's review of Tomb Raider: Anniversary.

I’m so glad I found this for $3 on an Xbox sale. I remember I had this game on PS2 when I was little and I could never make it past the T-Rex boss fight. Now after revisiting it for all these years, I can say it holds up surprisingly well. Of course, there’s still some jank to the platforming, especially when we live in a post-Uncharted world where you either use that game as a baseline or fall behind. But there is a focus on preciseness within the platforming that makes the jank kinda make sense in a weird way. It just requires you to be a bit more patient than usual. The story is a low point, mostly because it’s just nothing to write home about. It adds a very basic structure to the game to make you feel like there’s a overall objective to what you’re playing but the genius of the game really lies in just moving through these quiet tombs as a badass character that can take on ancient creatures. I’d like to emphasize how the quietness of the tombs is a really beautiful aspect to this game that I don’t see in games nowadays. The ambience of your movements as Lara echoing through these vast and empty tombs is so striking to play through. It kinda makes you lean in a bit as a player and focus more on the task at hand. It almost makes the cutscenes and all the spoken dialogue in general feel disparate from the game tonally because the ambience really gives this its identity. I wish the rest of the older games were remastered to this style of gameplay cause I would 100% play through all of them if that were the case. But alas, the newer remasters’ insistence on keeping the tank controls will forever be the most potent repellant to ever stay within gaming.