Tomb Raider 4 is my favorite game of all time. I say this to get an obvious bias out of the way while reviewing Tomb Raider IV-VI Remastered. If this collection was that game alone, I’d slap a 10/10 on it, demand you all play it immediately and leave it at that.

However, this is not just one game. Following on from last year’s remaster of the first three Tomb Raider games, Tomb Raider IV-VI Remastered does the same with the next three. The final three Tomb Raider games made by original developer Core Design, in fact – The Last Revelation, Chronicles and The Angel of Darkness. However, this may be a harder sell overall.

Not for Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation though. As a game that saw Core try and bring the series to an end, it feels like a huge extravagant attempt to deliver an adventure that cemented Lara’s legacy for good. Take all the best elements of the three games that came before it, stuff it in a blender and this is what comes out. It’s also a Tomb Raider game with a strong storyline for the first time, as Lara accidentally unseals Set, the Egyptian god of disorder. This kickstarts a potential apocalypse unless she can find the Armour of Horus and re-seal the dark deity. It’s still a goofy pulp adventure, but this gives the game greater stakes and helps expand Lara Croft as a character.

As a result of this premise, the entire game is set in Egypt. This is a far cry from the first three games, which saw Lara flying across the world, uncovering the secrets of multiple civilizations. However, Core managed to maintain this kind of variety, even within a single country. Of course, there are pyramids and Horus and palaces to great pharaohs, but we also see the Roman influence as well as contemporary Egypt. There’s even a level set on a moving train.

But what Tomb Raider 4 does so well is taking the creaky old Tomb Raider engine and pushing it to its absolute limit. Obviously, it’s less impressive now than it was in 1999, but Core managed to throw in pole-climbing, laser sight aiming and rope swinging into an engine mostly built for pushing blocks around a grid. There’s a greater athleticism to Lara’s movements and the puzzle design is some of the best in the series. As the game progresses, you’ll encounter puzzles that involve assembling an ancient map of the stars, making use of mirror illusions and solving the classic water jug puzzle.

The remaster barely has to do any work to bring out the best in this game. The same visual splash of paint its predecessors got last year is present, but it also feels faster. I don’t know if this is just down to an improved framerate or if they did tweak Lara’s movement directly, but it works wonderfully. It’s a buttery smooth experience that helps an already excellent game shine. If Tomb Raider IV-VI Remastered was just The Last Revelation, I’d call it essential.

However, while The Last Revelation is easily the gem of Tomb Raider IV-VI Remastered, it’s not all we have to discuss. Both Tomb Raider Chronicles and The Angel of Darkness are also here, and they are some of the more contentious entries in the series. Both were rushed, buggy and showed signs of how much the team was tired of the series by this point. There’s a reason these two games are the final games made by Core Design before the series was ed over to current owners Crystal Dynamics.

Let’s start with Tomb Raider Chronicles. This is a game made over a span of only a few months, a desperate request from Eidos to release a game for the 2000 holiday season. It’s a much shorter anthology game, one built around several small adventures from Lara’s past. Because it’s an anthology, the quality constantly fluctuates.

The game starts strong in Rome, as Lara navigates the eerily quiet streets of the city, encountering strange machines and the remnants of its ancient history. It feels like a minor extension of The Last Revelation. Russia keeps this up, evoking strong comparisons with the industrial parts of past Tomb Raider games. Just a shame that it mostly hangs around a single submarine.

The last two segments show signs of Core’s boredom with the series, as they were clearly determined to make anything else here. Ireland chases the contemporary survival horror boom, with an unarmed teenage Lara dealing with demons and fey beings. It’s got some fun ideas but the levels feel exceptionally short and forgettable.

And then there’s New York, an attempt to emulate the successes of The Matrix and Metal Gear Solid with a high-tech spy adventure. However, this is where the limitations of the engine begin to show. The introduction of stealth takedowns and fast-paced sniping fall apart quickly as the controls simply don’t work well for it.

The original version of this section was also compounded by bugs, most of which crashed the game, corrupted your save or created invisible walls. Tomb Raider IV-VI Remastered does a great job ironing out these problems, as it was a much smoother experience this time around. However, it does nothing to correct the inherent design problems here, which are sadly just baked into the game.

Speaking of design problems baked into the game, Tomb Raider IV-VI Remastered rounds off with Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness. This was the first game in the series released for the PS2, notorious for almost killing the entire franchise. It’s an example of developer ambition far exceeding their capabilities. The original game launched with half its content missing, a broken control scheme and a general sense that the series had lost its way. It’s the only Tomb Raider game I’ve not played multiple times.

The remaster does do a decent job in fixing many of the worst technical issues. The controls were the most obvious example of this, as they’re now much more responsive and align better with previous entries. The experience feels less buggy as some of the more egregious issues seem to have been ironed out. However, it’s far from perfect, as Lara’s overall movement is still sluggish and new bugs appear to have snuck their way in, such as when I got stuck under a bench within minutes of exploring a restored area at the start of the game.

The fixes don’t do much to solve the inherent problems with The Angel of Darkness, however. Following on from the feeling in Chronicles that Core wanted to make literally anything other than Tomb Raider, The Angel of Darkness is a moody murder mystery adventure game. There’s a lot of wandering around Paris talking to people and finding clues and little actual tomb raiding. Some of this can be interesting, but a lot of it feels half-baked and doesn’t feel like Tomb Raider.

The adventure elements like NPC dialog trees and shops do little more than slow down the already plodding experience. Meanwhile, the strength-boosting mechanic remains as useless as ever, prompting endless moments of Lara refusing to open a door until she’s hung from a ledge for thirty seconds first. It adds nothing but padding.

As an overall package, Tomb Raider IV-VI Remastered is a great remaster. If you played the remaster of the original trilogy last year, you’ll know what to expect here. The blocky polygons of the original PS1 games have been swapped out in favor of newly created models and textures. However, the original graphics are still an option, available at the touch of a single button at any time. The modern controls, while not my personal preference, are a decent compromise between the original design and the expectations of a modern audience. The amount of work applied to The Angel of Darkness alone is impressive. As remasters go, this is a perfect example of how to do it right.

Overall, Tomb Raider IV-VI Remastered is a mixed bag. It’s an excellent remaster that balances preservation and improvement. However, two-thirds of this package are games that are, at best, merely fine, even with improvements. For The Last Revelation though? It’s worth it for that alone. 

Tomb Raider IV-VI Remastered is out now for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S and Nintendo Switch.

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The best parts of Space Marine 2 come right before the swarm is upon you. Raining shells down on an undulating tide of teeth and tentacles as it surges over the colossal factories of an equally uncaring and murderous galactic empire, it's these moments that Warhammer is all about. It's just a shame that crashing your own hulking tower of ceramite-coated muscle into the fray is more frustrating than glorious.

But let's back up for a moment, a tactical withdrawal if you will. Way back in distant 2011, Relic Entertainment took a break from making Sci-Fi RTS games to release Space Marine, a action game well regarded for selling the power fantasy of Warhammer's inhuman poster boys. There were wonderously gory executions, a good spread of chunky, impactful weapons and a decent multiplayer mode that let you dress up your space men in your favorite colors. The story was mostly a macguffin hunt, but even that managed a few moments memorable enough to become memes or references still used in the fanbase today.

Flash forward to 2024 and Saber Interactive's Space Marine 2, which replicates all the original's strengths and weaknesses on an impressive new scale. That same punchy combat returns complete with visceral executions but instead of mobs of Orks you face swarms of the insectoid Tyranids, at least before the forces of Chaos inevitably show up. The roster of weapons has expanded to include things like heavy plasma guns and something like 8 variants of bolter, and instead of a contextless horde mode there are now PvE missions threaded into the narrative (a horde mode is planned for later).

First off, the environments deserve a special mention. It felt like every level in Space Marine 2 I was stopping to gawk at some awe-inspiring sight or another, from haunting war-machines the size of cities towering over a long dead world to the remains of a brutalist factory complex stricken by organic artillery. Meanwhile the skies are literally filled with foes that school like dangerous, airborne fish, enabled by Saber's touted Swarm Engine. And afterwards I would load in to the Battle Barge, the spaceship that serves as your hub area, and pore over the vehicles and armor on display. It's a treat.

But back to the action. Space Marine 2's third-person combat is immediately familiar if you've played the first game: blast chaff enemies apart with the satisfying ka-chunk of your Bolter, then wade into melee with an electric sword, a chainsaw-sword, or just a really big knife. Executing enemies replenishes armor, while dealing damage lets you steal back some of your recently lost health, á la Bloodborne. The stun system is gone, however, replaced with a parry-and-counter button that is at once the most satisfying and infuriating part of combat.

As enemies launch certain attacks, you will see a red marker if you need to dodge or a blue one if you're able to counter. Slam the button at the right time to execute it, with counters slaying smaller enemies outright or stunning larger ones ready for a follow-up pistol shot. I ended up enjoying these far more than the executions, in part due to them just being snappier, but they also felt more rewarding than just beating an enemy until they glowed red. The full executions were satisfying at first, but quickly become tiresome with how many elite enemies you have to deal with, and a ranged execute option would have been nice too. They do at least shield you from damage during the animation, which was a pet peeve Space Marine 2 thankfully doesn't bring back from the first game.

But the real frustration comes from just how fragile you are. Even basic 'gaunts can shred through your ceramite armor like tissue paper if they land a hit, and they aren't all polite enough to broadcast their attacks with colored markers. You can (and in fact, need to,) block and dodge these attacks but it's incredibly hard to do so in a large group or while focusing on a larger foe. Space Marine 2 makes you feel like you should be able to wade into a swarm and keep yourself alive through parries and counters, with the rythmn and heft of the Arkham Batman games, but instead you have to dance around packs of enemies until they're thinned out enough to pick off. It's here the game loses a lot of that super-soldier fantasy it was otherwise doing so well at building.

This parry system does feel like an improvement on the first game's stun mechanic, but it fails to solve the problem the system had where you could be overwhelmed without a satisfying counter-play. It's at this point I began feeling like Space Marine 2 was becoming a bit too faithful of a sequel, as the same issues with combat came back despite the games being over a decade apart. The narrative also fell in to the same trap of revolving around an uninteresting macguffin, despite it feeling most compelling as a more traditional war story. I was more invested in fighting alongside Major Sarkaana and her battallion in the first level, the human soldiers cartoonishly small compared to Titus and pals, than chasing after the nebulous Project Aurora in the final missions.

That's not to say the story was completely flat, there are some juicy hooks floating around. A now-demoted officer returning to his force to find them modernized and re-equipped, put in command of a squad who don't know him and can't be told his history, and a captain having enough trouble facing insurmountable odds without having to take on a troublemaking veteran several times his age and experience. There's potential there and it even simmers well for bit as your companions discuss you, thinking you're out of earshot. But it just doesn't meaningfully pay off.

Then there's the inclusion of the Chaos faction, the traitor space marines of the Thousand Sons. We knew they would be present from the trailers, but that doesn't mean they couldn't let the mystery simmer a bit. And for a while it felt like it was going to, as overheard conversations on the battle barge talk about strange malfunctions and unexplained occurrences. But then you just find a load of magic runes scrawled about a ritual site and the jig is up. From then on they're just another enemy that shows up some times, and while the more ranged focus is a nice reprieve from the 'Nids they don't provide anything especially new, or even narratively justify their presence. I'm not even sure they explain who the Thousand Sons legion are, why their armor is empty, or where the weird goat-demons come from.

A lot of chatter online has been suggesting that Space Marine 2 is only worth it for fans of the franchise, and while there's lots of greebly detail to obsess over I think it's actually the opposite. The game excels at selling the surface details, the heft of your marines and the scale of setting, but falls short of delivering really juicy combat or interesting narrative. There's clearly a lot of intended replayability through PvE and PvP modes the developers have said they intend to build on, but I just don't know if I'm going to be engaged enough by the combat to keep coming back. When it shines, Space Marine 2 can be really good but there's just a few too many irritating flaws to recommend it as much as I want to.

Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S.

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Namco Bandai is dabbling in the cover shooter genre with Inversion and their twist on the genre is twisting gravity. Davis Russel used to be an ordinary cop, but during the events in Inversion he acquires the ability to temporarily disable gravity. Shoot a blue blast at an enemy and they’ll float helplessly in the air. The same move can be used to pick up objects like cars to create cover or squish foes.

Inversion also has levels where you, you’re enemies, and cover points are all in zero gravity. Instead of running to take cover, Davis dives from ledge to ledge. Think of the layout in the screenshot above with floating handholds. Players can select which floating handhold they want to grab (a green aura lets you know your target) before diving to the next mid-air cover point. Inversion a co-op story mode and competitive multiplayer modes which weren’t discussed during the press event.

Saber Interactive, the studio that developed Timeshift, are behind Inversion. Namco Bandai plans to release Inversion for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 on February 7, 2012.

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