I love the 2013 reboot and Rise, while Shadow is just okay - but their dedication to realism and a narrative that far too often surrenders itself to melodrama means that more fantastical moments are abandoned entirely. It’s goofy, terrifying, and touches on what makes Tomb Raider so special, something that has been lost as the Survivor trilogy opted for realism over fantasy, a double-edged sword for Lara Croft’s future in many ways.
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It doesn’t, especially when smaller ones join the ranks and aim to make your day a living hell. Your instinct is to keep shooting, firing blindly as you hope this creature goes down without a fight. A towering dinosaur screeches out of the fog, rushing towards our heroine with bloodlust in its eyes. So when Lara Croft waltzes in hoping to stumble across untold treasures, the local occupants aren’t too thrilled to see her. However, this also means that wildlife has been left to exist without intervention, away from events that have reshaped the outside world in untold ways. Lost Valley is a beautiful place, christened by luscious greenery and crystalline waterfalls that define it as a natural wonder untouched by human civilization. Related: Arcane's Success Shouldn't Distract From Riot's Troubled Past The game’s opening involves hopping around caves and duking it out with tigers and bears - which I can totally deal with, easy peasy - but dinosaurs are another matter entirely. Such limitations were what turned Silent Hill into a hive of melancholic dread, but they also gave Tomb Raider’s Lost Valley an unintentional horror that sticks with me all these years later. The PlayStation’s limited hardware meant that three-dimensional environments couldn’t be rendered in their entirety, so huge shrouds of fog were used to hide blemishes in the geometry as small pieces of each level loaded in as you approached them.
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While it’s comical today, fighting dinosaurs in Tomb Raider terrified me as a kid.
SHADOW OF THE TOMB RAIDER XBOX ONE UPGRADE
Tomb Raider: Anniversary saw the prehistoric beasties return with a graphical upgrade and more nuanced combat mechanics, but the majesty of their polygonal ancestors remains the shining example of our beloved adventurer taking on creatures that should have long surrendered themselves to extinction. Their presence in the 1996 classic was iconic, cemented in the zeitgeist of a generation partly defined by Lara Croft pulling off backflips as she fired her dual pistols into the snout of an encroaching, razor-toothed lizard. Like millions of others, one of my defining memories of the original Tomb Raider involves dinosaurs.