#platform game

Immediately, not one sentence into this review, I shall address the largest elephant in the room and say "it's not as good as the PlayStation version". What an absolutely tiresome thing to have to do, given that the game was initially released on the SEGA platform, has a few bugs that were fixed for the PlayStation version (as well as, OMG, adding the fucking handstand) -- in a way, playing Tomb Raider on Saturn is like having a fun jaunt through a fully-playable beta version of the game. With less save points, because real ones play SEGA according to my partner.

Now to continue with the revieWAIT, ANOTHER ELEPHANT JUST ENTERED THE ROOM. This one's wearing a shirt that says 'tank controls' and it can fuck right off. The tank controls are fine - the game was designed with them in mind. In fact, shortly after the gym tutorial section in Lara's House I got very well acquainted with the tempo and rhythm of the movement back in 1996 as I did during my recent playthrough of it in 2025. Walk to ledge, line up jump, hop back, hold forward and the jump button; with the 'action' button employed if a ledge grab may be needed. There's a cadence to it all that becomes quite comfortably-reliable after a while. The tank controls are fine. Anybody who says otherwise is probably operating from the POV that if the player presses 'jump', the foregone conclusion is that the game will assist, aid, and otherwise graciously handhold the player in every possible way to ensure that they end up at their target destination of The Other Ledge.

Kid, this ain't that kinda game.

I'm not saying that to appreciate Tomb Raider requires a history lesson, but I'm going to give one in brief. That fluid "press jump, go in smooth arc, land easily" style of platforming seen in Mario and its ilk was only one possible way to convey the concept of vertical locomotion in the early days of videogames. I won't go into the others in depth, but one such example was seen in the original 1989 Prince of Persia title; often attributed as 'cinematic' platformers, but I personally call them 'ledge grabbers' due to the mechanical focus.

One can, if they wished, draw a direct through-line from Prince of Persia, to 1992's Flashback, detouring via 1994's Blackthorne, and then diverging into the separate paths that are Tomb Raider and 1997's cult PlayStation classic Abe's Oddysee. It's a whole 'thing', a whole genre of games cut from the same cloth; experiences in which a "simple" jump from-and-to isn't as much a foregone conclusion as it is a whole-ass puzzle in and of itself. We'd see things go full-circle and evolved even further with 2003's frankly legendary Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time but I digress.

The fact here is, most of the game here is that platform-puzzle ledgegrab-porn affair and I'm personally absolutely here for it. There are some actual (read: more conventional) puzzles present, too -- as Lara often finds herself pushing large square blocks around in order to facilitate more hopping from surface to surface at the game's considered; almost turn-based; pace. Of course they're square, everything's a fucking square here. Oh, wait, so is another elephant that just invited itself to this soiree. One moment please.

I can joke about the platforming in Tomb Raider being a turn-based affair, but that's closer to the truth than it is mere jest. Indeed, the fact that the game's architecture does in general conform to a grid helps to facilitate this; and, in lieu of proper 3D cameras (as this game was released in an era where camerawork frankly sucked and right analogue sticks weren't even a thing to help fix that) the standardisation of scale this helps to enforce can give the player a very clear impression of the distance of any given gap, and therefore what length of jump is required to clear it. Indeed, I don't think I was caught off-guard by a single leap during my playthrough.

It's not just platforming, though. One of Tomb Raider's most-iconic and memorable setpieces involves a fight with a large dinosaur in the third level, so yeah there's combat. And I'm here today to tell you that the combat absolutely blows. Strangely, there are no elephants for this one in general, but I'd invite one in for tea and peanuts in this particular case. Because, yes, I'll agree with any criticism anybody has about the gunplay for this thing.

It boils down to this; with guns drawn, Lara automatically points at the closest foe in range. Hold down the 'action' button in this state and she fires at the cyberdemon enemy until it dies. They're sometimes faster than Lara, so some jumping around may be required; there's a button to perform a 180 dodge-roll to help with this. Enemies are also sometimes armed with their own firearms, ain't no dodge-roll gonna help with those. I'd say I burned my way through 90% of my medipacks in these situations having given up any pretence of dodging and resigning myself to a war of attrition, one bulletsponge versus another-who-can-heal-themselves.

So, platforming good: combat shite. That's the general flavour of it.

Level design is generally excellent, though; to a point. But I'll get to that. Every level has its own flavour, and there's a wealth of varied things to do; find the cogs for a mechanism to redirect a flow of water, turn three lead bars into gold, raise and lower the water level in a massive chamber to access new areas -- that last one's actually my favourite in the game, despite absolutely tanking the framerate on Saturn. What a damn good job that pseudo-turnbased movement compensates for heavy lag, then. Score one more for those unpopular tank controls; they absolutely work for this game and how it was designed, and I will die on this hill. This boxy, obviously conforming to a square grid, hill.

But that point I mentioned, and it happens at the last fifth of the game, is where the level designers decided the reins come off and they were allowed to be as sadistic and mean-spirited as they like; the last fifth of the game contains some absolute bullshit, I tell you what. Enemies who explode into damaging pieces (which can kill at close quarters if you're not entirely careful), untelegraphed rolling boulders placed in such a way that only some foreknowledge could warn you where they were (because the camera ain't shit for that), et cetera and so forth. It's when the game ramps itself up to 11 that the seams start to show and the flaws become quite apparent.

I didn't know where else to mention it, but the amount of deaths I had due to the slight delay between pressing the START button and having the inventory actually appear onscreen was large enough and significant enough to also count as a point against.

But, was it worth (re)playing?

Absolutely, and I do not regret the time I spent playing this game. It spearheaded an entire franchise for a reason after all, and those janky early-3D vistas are still something to behold almost 30 years after the fact. I've said before that Tomb Raider isn't just about exploration from a narrative standpoint, but a technological one also -- 3D games were very new, and the 3D platformer hadn't yet received the definitive genre template that was Mario 64 when this game was being developed -- it was all new territory, and playing through the game in 2025 is almost akin to reading the journals of some olde worlde explorer chronicling their experiences; good and bad, successes and failures, treasures and pitfalls; in undiscovered lands.

It's flawed, but nonetheless iconic.