In 2025, a new Tomb Raider Remastered Series will be released. It will include a game that was so bad that it 'almost ended the series'

Aspyr will release a new trilogy of Lara Croft adventures in the wake of the success of Tomb Raider 1-3 Remastered, which was released earlier this year. Tomb Raider 6 Remastered will be available on Steam on 14 February 2025.

The new trilogy will include updated versions of mainline Tomb Raider titles The Last Revelation (1999), Chronicles (2000) and The Angel of Darkness (2003). The remastered versions will feature updated graphics and controls, with the option to play them in their original style, if you prefer. They will also include health bars for bosses and achievements.

The original remastered trilogy is very good: Our chief complaint about it was that it was a little too true to the original in some ways, like irritating ambient audio effects, not-great AI, basic gunplay, and a sometimes-uncooperative camera. It will be interesting to see whether this commitment to the old-time feel carries over in Tomb Raider 4 Remastered, because the final part of the trilogy, Angel of Darkness - to put it bluntly - was really bad.

I don't know where to find our original review, which was published in October 2003. According to Metacritic, we called it "infuriatingly buggy and ultimately boring". In a recent retrospective review of the game, we called it "the game which almost killed the series". This can be summarized with the following conclusion: "When Eidos removed this series from Core's control, it was not engaging in executive meddling." It was doing a public service."

Aspyr faces a big challenge with this remaster: While bugs can be fixed you can't fix fundamentally bad gameplay. The Angel of Darkness was a technical mess but its design and mechanics were what made it so memorable (and not in a positive way). When your underlying design inspires phrases like "Tears of idiotic stupidity continue to drop," you've got work to do.

Or maybe not. After all, it's been twenty years. Maybe nostalgia will make players forget about Aspyr. It's possible that they'll like it even now, but given our recent replay of the game, this seems less likely. It would be smart for developers to treat this as a historical curiosity. Perhaps with a pre-play message similar to the ones you see before racist Looney Tunes cartoons. "Yeah it stinks, but that's what it was like in 2003." At least you were warned this time.