Tomb Raider Thread

[Dr. Zoidberg]

Let's kick off the "long awaited" Tomb Raider thread with a mobile game. Yay!

Lara blasts onto mobile in 2021! Tomb Raider Reloaded is a free to play action arcade game made by Emerald City Games and published by Square Enix London Mobile, stay tuned for more news.

Remember when Lara had big pointy polygons? Now she has smaller round ones. Nothing wrong with that though.

[Stormwatch]

Lolita Croft, basically.

[Hawq]

Japan will love that, though they may want the tits to be bigger

[Dr. Zoidberg]

[melancholy]

I was going to pick up the Switch version, but I decided to get the Steam one instead after hearing how bad some of the updated textures were. I’m hoping for some fan patches. That, and when I played these originally, I used a keyboard. And one of the reviews I read said that keyboard controls is still the best way to play them.

[Dr. Zoidberg]

John on the Digital Foundry video says that using the keyboard is his favourite way to play it.

I'll get the Steam version eventually for some laptop and Steam Deck play.

[melancholy]

I played about 30 minutes of it tonight, and it's...weird. The new graphics feel more like a fan mod than a professional release, but honestly, I'm okay with them. Some reviewers were nitpicking how bad the new textures were, but considering they had to use the original world geometry to make the game work correctly, I was expecting way worse than this. And there are some parts that actually look extremely good. Not perfect, but fine.

The controls annoy me. The modern mode allows you free movement, sure, but at the cost of losing a large chunk of her moveset. Modern controls loose backwards jump, sideways jump, backwards hop (an absolute crime since you need that to line up running jumps), or sideways step. It's doable, but it makes some precise jumps way slower to prepare for. However, adding mouse support is a literal game-changer. The ability to look everywhere and change direction with mouse movements is a godsend. I thought the perfect control combo would be tank controls with mouse support (getting a full move set with fast mouse movement), so I turned them on...only to discover the mouse is turned off if you use tank controls. It's infuriating, because the perfect setup is nearly within reach, but it's taken away from us.

Another odd thing is the ability to switch between old graphics and new. Press F1 and you can go back in time to see what the game originally looked like. But what's weird is the original graphics actually break parts of the game. Classic graphics are hard locked at 30FPS, and mouse look is completely broken and gets stuck on everything. If you read reviews of people complaining about the camera, it's probably because they were playing in classic graphic mode.

Overall, I'm hoping someone fixes this release up a bit, because I feel like some small tweaks would make a huge difference making these classics a lot more enjoyable. Even just adding mouse support to tank controls would revolutionize movement.