This has never been a series about gunplay, although many look to Uncharted as the Tomb Raider killer despite the franchises taking drastically different approaches to the ratio of combat versus exploration. Underworld concludes the trilogy-as the games were all loosely connected with an overarching narrative concerning Lara Croft’s search for the truth about her mother’s ultimate fate-and it keeps the momentum going with the same elegant-if old fashioned by modern standards-mix of exploration and puzzle solving with some occasional combat. Legend is a good, playable game that corrects the mistakes of the Core’s disastrous Angel of Darkness debut on the PS2, and Anniversary updates the original with the fluid mechanics of Legend to make a classic game digestible for people that can’t stomach PS1 graphics clunky controls from the 90s. These are still the same great games that they originally were when released. In the gameplay department there’s little to say. The actual sounds of the fire arms still doesn’t carry the same punch as in a focused, first person shooter, but the surround effects of cavernous temples and jungle clearings with waterfalls makes good use of a multi-speaker set up. Dolby Digital surround sound has been used for the games, and it frequently makes use of a lot of bass that can shake the house when massive, ancient stone doors are sliding open. Sound is a real treat, especially for people that think cinematic games need to use the subwoofer a lot. This is the best that the two games have ever looked and it’s a noticeable jump in quality for people that remember the original PS2 versions. For the most part, these are solid ports, although the frame rate occasionally stutters in cut-scenes, but it’s reliably smooth during actual gameplay. Like the 360 versions, Anniversary and Legend have gotten higher resolution textures and they’ve have their aspect ratios tweaked to comfortably fit modern 16:9 widescreen TVs. The biggest things to take note of are in the visual and audio departments. The other two games have already appeared in high def versions on the Xbox 360, but this is the first time the trilogy has appeared on the PS3 in the wake of the console losing its backwards compatibility.

This means that Underworld is completely unchanged from its initial release. Tomb Raider: Legend is the only true game that fits that description, with Tomb Raider: Anniversary already being a “face lift” title of the original PS1/Saturn Tomb Raider original, while Tomb Raider: Underworld was actually released for current generation consoles in 2008. Unlike other collections, this bundle of games isn’t a straight up mashing of titles from the past generation.

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