I know it’s probably tantamount to sacrilege to admit it, but I never really got the appeal of the original Tomb Raider games. It took until the Square Enix reboots for me to properly enjoy one of (or actually, three of) Lara Croft’s adventures.

Yet there’s no denying the impact that Lara Croft had on gaming, and even pop culture in general. She was huge, and the Tomb Raider games were genuine phenomenons, both commercially and critically.

Despite my lack of interest in the games when they were released, I still picked up this cartridge, which features the original trilogy of games, in their PlayStation incarnations.

And I have actually enjoyed them this time around. Despite awkward, poorly-aged tank controls, which I hated at the time too, Lara remains a brilliantly versatile and acrobatic character to control.

The levels in Tomb Raider are impressively huge too, though this can sometimes work against the experience with finding your way around, and there’s no hand holding at all in these early games. They can be challenging for the wrong reasons, and it’s a bit of a culture shock for gamers used to modern conveniences.

Still, at least Evercade save states work; without those, the torturously spaced out save points would render the experiences pretty joyless, as I found them to be in the 90s.

Given how big these three games are, it’s a great value Evercade cartridge, offering a lot of bang for your buck. The engine and the gameplay itself feels like it’s getting a little too ambitiously used by the closing part of the trilogy, but even so, each game is still fun; that is, if you can put up with the quirks of the era.

You can buy Tomb Raider Collection 1 from Amazon.

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