Game info

• Title Tomb Raider III
• Developer [Core Design Aspyr]
• Publisher [Eidos Interactive Aspyr]
• Year 1998
• Platform Playstation 5
• Genre Action

Lara Croft returns in her most daring adventure to date - Tomb Raider III. In a search to find four mysterious artifacts fashioned from the heart of an ancient meteorite, Lara journeys through 5 challenging adventures packed with new puzzles, hidden traps and ruthless enemies! From the jungles of India to the icy wastes of Antarctica, across the rooftops of London and into the depths of Nevada's mysterious Area 51, Lara has new vehicles, weapons and moves to outwit her foes. Be ready for anything and prepare to be amazed!

Player Select

Immediately after finishing Tomb Raider II, it was only a couple of taps on the controller to just ‘see what TR3 is like’. Which of course ended up in playing it in earnest, trying to figure out all the puzzles and collecting all the secrets. Immediately it’s not that far removed from its predecessor but there are differences as you go along.

It’s in the Game

The main difference is naturally in the locations that Lara finds herself in, and this game is a bit hit and miss. I really, really loved the subways of London and the Nevada desert was fantastic. But the jungle is really hard to navigate, and the underwater propulsion levels were so irritating. It’s quite fun that you can choose which levels you do next, and which order you do the adventures in, but I kind of think there must be a preferred path that sees you have the maximum guns and ammo at any one moment.

Talking of which, there does seem to be an abundance of pickups here, but they are quite often well hidden. As always, we’re making excellent use of Stella’s walkthroughs and without them I don’t think I’d have a clue where I was going or what I was doing. Pretty standard, to be fair.

The weapons are fun this time, the Desert Eagle is very powerful but I’m quite partial to the MP5 as well. Unfortunately the levels around India featured quite a lot of snakes and I’ll be honest, I was more than happy to waste a shotgun shell or two on them, even though they couldn’t move to chase you. Seems like a weird choice when the one thing that scares me most about snakes is how speedily slithery they are.

Regardless, there are still a few levels to get through but I’m happy to have got far enough through to know that it’s not quite as good as TR2 but better than Chronicles.

Thoughts

Having said that, I do wonder if some of the Nevada levels were better than even Venice, which has been my absolute favourite up until now. I can see us powering through the rest of this game relatively quickly which just leaves us with the original Tomb Raider game to play (although they are remaking that so might wait for that), and Angel of Darkness. I liked Angel of Darkness although I don’t think any other Tomb Raider fans did, but now having played these earlier games, I can see why and might have to be revising my opinion.

End of level boss - Mar 26

As I suspected, we did whip through the rest of the game very quickly, and it was all quite fun. The good levels were great, the bad levels were quite irritating, and overall it’s just a really, really good Tomb Raider game. Hooray!

Rating: 3 / 5