Tomb Raider I-III Remastered

Tomb Raider I-III Remastered brings back to Xbox Series X and S the trio of original Lara Croft adventures from the nineties – Tomb Raider, Tomb Raider II, and Tomb Raider III – in reworked graphical form, while also preserving the accompanying expansions and bonus levels from later releases. The player explores vast tombs, temples, sunken ships, and ancient ruins around the world, solves spatial puzzles based on jumping, climbing, swimming, and pushing blocks, and faces wild animals as well as human enemies, and can switch on the fly at any time between the classic and modern look and between the original tank controls and their more modern variant with free camera movement around the character.

The remaster on Xbox Series brings new lighting, higher-resolution textures, modernized character models, and reworked water effects, while the level design and puzzle placement remain faithful to the originals, so the games retain their tough, at times uncompromising difficulty, demanding trap sequences, and the typical leaps of faith where the player has to guess the right path in advance. The original music and ambient sounds, which built up the mysterious atmosphere of abandoned tombs and dangerous traps, have been preserved unchanged and still work well, as does the iconic sound of a collected artifact and the distinctive creak of Lara's backpack.

The first Tomb Raider from 1996 was among the pioneers of the 3D action-adventure genre, and Lara Croft became one of the most famous video game characters of all time, while the second and third entries expanded the concept with more varied settings, from Venetian canals to Himalayan peaks, vehicles, and more demanding acrobatics. The remastered collection today serves as a convenient way to play these landmark titles without having to fight outdated controls and camera, and it's a reminder of how fundamentally they shaped the action-adventure genre at the turn of the millennium, even more than twenty years later.

Why play it: For action-adventure fans wanting to relive Lara Croft's pioneering early days without wrestling with the outdated controls and camera of the original versions.