platformer

For a lot of the games I’ve written about in the C:ArsGames series, I’ve come to the conclusion that the games hold up pretty well, despite their age—Master of Orion II, Jill of the Jungle, and Wing Commander Privateer, for example. Each of those have flaws that show now more than ever, but I still had a blast revisiting each of them.

This time I’d like to write about one that I think doesn’t hold up quite as well for me: For the first time in almost 30 years, I revisited the original Tomb Raider via 2024’s Tomb Raider I-III Remastered collection.

You might be thinking this is going to be a dunk on the work done on the remaster, but that’s not the case, because the core issue with playing 1996’s Tomb Raider in 2026 is actually unsolvable, no matter how much care is put into a remaster.

The age of tank controls

Tomb Raider was part of the first wave of multiplatform games with fully 3D gameplay, releasing the same year as similarly groundbreaking 3D titles Super Mario 64 and Quake. I think you could make a pretty compelling case that most of the modern AAA games industry can trace its lineage in some way back to those three titles.

Because it was the beginning of mass-market 3D games (yes, I know other, more niche 3D games existed before), there were no established best practices for things like the controls or the camera.

Tomb Raider opted for a modality that was common for a few years before it was replaced by clearly better solutions: what we now call “tank controls,” where forward or back moves the character forward or back, but hitting left or right turns the character on its axis in place without moving.

The way it works is naturally intuitive enough, which is part of why it was so popular early on. But the industry has moved on because it’s frustratingly sluggish and clunky. I loved Tomb Raider‘s level design and atmosphere, and the designers did about as good a job as they could designing around the limitations of the controls for most of the combat sequences. But ultimately, there was enough combat that the sluggishness of this input method significantly detracted from my enjoyment.

In 1996, I had little to compare it to, and the novelty of these vertically stacked 3D levels played from a third-person perspective was powerful enough that I had no complaints. But after 30 years of new ideas and iteration, the industry’s designers have solved all the problems this game has with controls.

That’s why the studio behind the remaster tried including an alternative modern control scheme. Unfortunately, that doesn’t work for Tomb Raider at all.

Prince of Persia and grids

When work started on the original Tomb Raider, its developers are said to have had a specific cocktail of influences in mind: They wanted to combine the truly 3D navigable environments they had seen in the groundbreaking Ultima Underworld and the polygonal characters from Virtua Fighter, with gameplay inspired by the 1989 Jordan Mechner classic Prince of Persia.

If you’ve played Prince of Persia, you know the platforming in that game is both precise and challenging. To make jumps, you had to carefully position yourself before launching—one step forward, one step back, until you reached the perfect starting point.

The same goes for Tomb Raider. In fact, the entire game—all the puzzles, layouts, and platforming challenges—adheres to a strict grid system. Players can predict exactly how far protagonist Lara Croft will jump based on where they are on that grid. They can count steps to position themselves, and it’s basically required if you want to consistently navigate the game’s complex and precise jumping sequences without frustration.

Using the game’s original tank controls, you could step forward or backward in predictable ways, or side step, jump to the side, jump forward, jump backward, and so on, with specific numbers of presses on the arrow keys. The entire game was built around this principle.

As frustrating as tank controls are to a modern player, there was an exquisite elegance to this.

The remaster’s modern controls option works more like Tomb Raider Legends from the 2000s, and it’s that general approach that has become standard in almost all modern third-person 3D games.

They feel so much nicer and more responsive to a modern player who has been trained on that for the past two decades, even if that player is someone like me who did play the original games with tank controls back in the day. That short window of three to five years of muscle memory and comfort based on tank controls has been completely overwritten by more than 20 years with what the modern control scheme offers.

Unfortunately, the flexible modern controls lose almost all connection to that elegant grid system. What used to be a precise process—for example, “X steps forward, X steps to the left, then a backflip from exactly this spot”—is now a guessing game of feeling things out. And the platforming sequences aren’t designed with that in mind. As a result, the combat feels a lot better with modern controls, but just about everything else is much more frustrating than before.

Embracing Tomb Raider

I’m not the first to observe this about the remaster; reviewers and Reddit dwellers debated this at length when this release happened two years ago. But I hadn’t gotten to playing the remasters—or revisiting Tomb Raider at all since the ’90s—until I decided to try it out for C:ArsGames.

Tomb Raider is still worth revisiting, but it is frustrating to leave behind 20 years of muscle memory to return to a previous paradigm that ended up being an evolutionary dead end.

The more time you put into it, the more natural the tank controls feel, but without the wow factor of groundbreaking new 3D gameplay, it’s harder to put up with.

Tellingly, Tomb Raider has already gotten a complete remake (distinct from this remaster) once, and another one is coming. Both radically reinvent the gameplay and seem to turn away from the grid system that made the original what it was. Many modern players won’t put up with the tank controls, but not being willing to embrace those means you simply can’t experience Tomb Raider as it was originally intended.

And again, I’m not knocking the work done on this remaster. Fittingly, it was made by Aspyr, the same studio that ported the original games to the Mac in the ’90s. (For a few years, they absolutely dominated the Mac game market with their Windows-to-Mac ports.) They’re still porting games to Mac, Linux, iOS, and Android today—notably, they did all the Civilization VI ports—as well as remasters of classics for modern platforms.

There’s no version of the modern controls that would truly work from this game, so it’s not an execution issue, and I actually think that Tomb Raider I-III Remastered is possibly Aspyr’s most well-crafted work.

The remaster includes the ability to flip between classic graphics and a more contemporary look that I think does a great job of walking the line between honoring the ’90s original and looking nice to 2020s eyes. They even hired Timur “XProger” Gagiev, a developer known for work on Tomb Raider open source engine OpenLara, to be the remaster’s technical director.

The Tomb Raider franchise is about to enter a new era (controversially) under Embracer Group and Amazon Games; it remains to be seen whether it will be a good one. But if you want to go back to where it all started, I recommend grabbing this remaster (available on GOG and other storefronts, as well as on consoles) instead of playing the original release. Just stick with the tank controls, and I hope you adapt back to them more easily than I did!