Tomb Raider Anniversary Review

Anannya Sen’s Review

Ahhh, memories.

In the early days of mobile games, when people thought that Snake was the best alternative to actually using a mobile to make calls, there were a series of Tomb Raider games, that, with others, began setting the standards for qualilty gaming. Cutesy small graphics, decent if SNES style animation and lots of puzzles to solve and baddies to get past.

Tomb Raider anniversary is a throwback to those days and who would have thought that 3 years later I would be feeling nostalgia while playing this game! It's very much in the Tomb Raider mould of previous titles, as you explore a pyramid looking for an ancient artifact. Lara has her usual moves about her, running, jumping and shooting, although not at the same time.

In fact that's one of the problems of this game, I played it on a SE K600 and the graphics were pretty much exactly the same as they were 2 years ago. And when you consider the fact that Tomb Raider Legend was released a while ago, it makes you wonder what the issue is with the graphics and sound. Not that they're bad or anything, but they really haven't changed too much.

The controls are also still the same, they allow you to do all Lara-eqsue things but you still can't jump and shoot and it still takes a few seconds to register that you are running.

You know what else? While writing this review, I checked out our other Lara reviews from days gone by and the more I write this, the more I realise this is basically exactly the same as the first Lara game The Osiris Codex except this time you are searching for a Scion of something. The game has the same modes (adventure, arcade and time trial), the same number of levels (15) and through reading my hints for the Osiris Codex, it seems it even has the exact same puzzles!

I still played through to Level 11 although I had my suspicions from about Level 10. So it seems this really is an anniversary as this is a game from 2005 that has been re-released to celebrate the fact that the Lara franchise is 10 years old. The press release did say that they were going to be taking the best bits of the last 3 mobile games, I just didn't realise that this was going to be done literally!!

I think there is a better version for high end handsets, which also has one extra mode, but after playing this for quite a while I realised that even though it looks dated, it's still a lot of fun to play and quite addictive. What would be really great would be the new style of 3D graphics coming through and the level of puzzles and gameplay in this game. I guess we can hope that by the next anniversary I'm proved right!

Worth a look if you're not too worried about the average graphics, but drawn by the addictive gameplay and want to see what all the fuss was about on the original games. If you've played every version of the original series as I have, it might be best to give this a miss, unless you really want some nostalgia!