Tomb Raider IV–VI Remastered PC Review

The previous Tomb Raider Remastered collection, released last year and gathering the first three mainline games in the series, acted as a reminder that those classic games still have a real appeal to them, a unique flavour that is missing in big 2025. The seemingly clunky early 3D movement is actually remarkably precise and considered and the remastered visuals manage to bring things up to a modern standard whilst maintaining the vibe set by the iconic look of the originals. It’s a great collection of fantastic games and one well worth your time.

That collection, however, didn’t have Tomb Raider: The Angel Of Darkness on it.

The Angel Of Darkness, a game that famously sank the entire original Tomb Raider series upon it’s original release. A game that is hugely ambitious and is clearly trying to push the series forward but seems in love with the smell of its own farts and comes across bloated and – at times – a bit unfinished. There was certainly a bit of Tomb Raider fatigue around the release, which certainly didn’t help matters, but that fact it was a bit of a stinker was enough to put Tomb Raider on the shelf until the next generation of consoles and a full reboot with Tomb Raider: Legend. The original, polygon, genuine icon from the 32-bit era was dead and Angel Of Darkness killed it.

As part of this collection and being a game from a whole generation after the games included in the first collection, it’s definitely the most interesting inclusion and the first thing you’ll notice about Angel Of Darkness is how good it looks! Hitting the button to switch between the original and enhanced visual styles shows that there isn’t actually a whole load of difference, things are just a bit higher resolution.

Unfortunately, it’s STILL Angel Of Darkness, and the issues it had upon release haven’t seen any real change. It’s a weird twist tonally, set mainly in city locations, with Lara Croft pursuing a serial killer like it’s some David Fincher film. There’s not much actual titualar raiding of tombs here. Lara’s new abilities, like a few more melee moves, a stamina bar that dictates her ability to perform hand-to-hand combat and being able to stick to walls and peek around corners, don’t quite gel with the tried and tested classic Tomb Raider controls.

There’s also the semi-open nature of the game, which has you wandering around doing a lot of backtracking, which wouldn’t be the worst thing but the game is split up into loads of small segments, due to the PS2’s technical limitations, so you’re constantly in and out of load screens, making for a very stilted experience. The stealth sections are basic and yet, still poor and not particular interesting or add anything of worth to the package. The weirdest part of Angel Of Darkness is how Lara’s abilities ‘level up’ throughout playing the game when certain events happen. For instance, there’s a part where she can’t push a crate around until you trigger a sequence where she smashes through a wooden door. There’s no way of knowing what is going to improve an ability to help you progress and there’s even some situations you can get in where you haven’t actually gained the technique to progress, leaving the game soft-locked. It’s a confusing mess of a game that I would love to have seen a bit more work done to – there’s something GOOD in here, somewhere – but it needs much more than an otherwise superficial remastering, I’m afraid.

On the other hand, for my money, The Last Revelation is the high watermark for the original set of releases. A refined, sharp title that takes all of the lessons learned from the first three games and focuses on what works and jettisons most of what doesn’t. It’s a game that steers the series away from the move towards action and real life city locations and back towards puzzles and tombs, delivering a game that feels more like an evolution of the original game, rather than the direction the actual direct sequel took things in. The fact it is all set in one location – Egypt – is a touch disappointing, but this is an essential Tomb Raider game and easily the pick of the bunch on this collection.

Chronicles sits somewhere between the two. It’s nowhere near as rough as Angel Of Darkness, but is a definite step down from the high of Last Revelation. An ‘Anthology’ style title that definitely kickstarted a fair bit of series fatigue and feels a bit like a contractual obligation rather than a key piece of the Tomb Raider series. You jump around one-off levels based on adventures Lara went on throughout her life (even playing as young Lara at points) but the quality of levels varies wildly, but never quite troubling the best from the series. It’s still largely enjoyable but one for the hardcore Tomb Raider deviants, this one.

These remasters maintain all the extra features from the previous collection – the visual improvements, 60fps + mode, photo mode and other tweaks – and ultimately are the best way to play these games, it’s just the quality of games on offer here aren’t quite as consistently good as the first collection. Aspyr have been doing a really good job with these remasters, especially the Legacy Of Kain set released at the back end of last year and shows that they can do an excellent job in bringing these classic titles back for existing fans to enjoy again but with enough modernisation so a new audience can enjoy them without losing the spirit and feel of the original releases. They didn’t really put a foot wrong with this collection – unfortunately, in the case of Angel Of Darkness, Eidos already did that all those years ago.