Total Conversion:
Tomb Raider vs. Tomb Raider Anniversary

The confusingly named Atlantis level - after all, it already takes place within the pyramid the next level is named after - opens with another in-engine cutscene of Natla placing the Scion into its place, followed by a FMV of the pyramid bursting out of the mountain that covered it. In the original, Lara then enters a chamber with organic walls and floors and breeding cocoons, from which one by one more Atlantean monsters hatch. Anniversary shows that video game designers learned some Hitchcockean rules of suspense in the meantime - here, Lara enters the pyramid before the cutscene and has to walk past the cocoons while nothing is happening. Only then she sees Natla handle the Scion, the pyramid bursts free and the monsters finally attack Lara on her way back. The original then adds a lot of filler of levers that open doors that reveal more levers that open more doors, whereas the remake is just a lot of fighting and some running through corridors.

This is by far the largest stage in the original game, but Crystal Dynamics threw out the lot of it. It all revolves around the ascend of a huge tower with lava at the bottom, but whereas Lara does just a comparatively easy hop across the lava on each floor while being attacked by winged monsters, with the actual ascend taking place in several side chambers, in Anniversary she stays in the tower all the time. Instead, she has to get up by shooting at targets, which activate temporary platforming aids such as hooks for her rope and poles to swing on. Unfortunately, they also always cause some Atlantis bats to spawn. This section alone is almost bad enough to make the entirety of Anniversary a failed remake. The camera is worse than ever, the time window to climb to the next platform extremely limited, and the checkpoints are placed so that Lara always has to fight the winged monsters again after failing at the platforming. The bats always fly so high that the targeting system has serious problems aiming at them, but manual aiming is out of the question because their fireballs have Lara stumbling back and forth until she falls down from the narrow platforms unless she keeps save rolling back and forth all the time.

The first leg has Lara going through three major rooms. At first she needs to jump to a barely visible crevice at the side to let herself drop into an alcove below, opening a door at the other side of the lava sea. Then follows a water cave where she once again has to jump between flattened segments in a slanted wall to reach the heightened platform on the other side. The third room is the most interesting - it contains a row of stone pillars which are too far from the exit to reach it, so Lara needs to get back to another part of the previous room to flip a switch, only to find that flowing lava has pushed the pillars to the other side of the room.

The next segment has a room with many switches that open several doors underwater, but also free more enemies to shoot at. Behind that lies the most nonsensical room in the entire game: A boulder starts rolling down a slope as soon as Lara enters, blocking the exit before she can reach it. So of course the solution is to push a block to the bottom of the slope, exit the room through the back door and come back in, finding that the boulder has been reset but the block has not. Clearly, Core Design was finally running out of sensible ideas to iterate on the limited core mechanics the engine allowed for. 2007 Lara is still climbing the tower, by the way.

The first room of the next leg contains a sliding slope with spikes at the bottom, so Lara has to jump at the right time and the right place in order to reach the narrow walkable strips of floor on the other side. Then a room with a center pathway that is slanted so much Lara has to jump back and forth narrow passages on both sides of the room, then get up to the next floor, where the other Lara is still swinging along her rope to get higher up.

The last segment finally contains a lava room where switches in alcoves move around the placement of save pillars to step on, more monsters and a fun trap where a switch looks like it will open a door to several health packs but instead causes a lava wave to encroach on the corridor, threatening to swallow Lara if she doesn't find the way out through the ceiling at the far end. Crystal Dynamics' Lara never gets to see any of it, but only more tower climbing and bat fights.

After finally reaching the top of the tower, Lara finds herself in a room with three combined traps: Arrows keep shooting from the sides as Lara tries to slip through crushing spike doors (retracted and thus not visible on the screenshot), and a boulder that starts rolling down from the other side as soon as she steps between the doors. Here, Anniversary briefly converges with the original again, only omitting the boulder.

More exclusive 1996 content includes a throne room with the favorite chairs of the three ancient Atlantean rulers, one of which Lara has to push into a wall in order to get past, devious switches that drop her into more deathtraps that require quick reflexes to survive, and another minotaur fight in tight quarters.

Apparently Core Design wanted to make clear how much they loved Prince of Persia, thus inserting a homage to the Prince's shadow - except it's not Lara's shadow but a skinless Atlantean doppelganger who mirror-mimicks her every movement. Just like the shadow in Prince of Persia, attacking her actually hurts Lara (not depicted: the three monsters that immediately attack when Lara enters the room, making it easy to fire accidental shots at her clone). The trick is to open a trap door on one end of the room then walk to the exact opposite spot to make the doppelganger drop down to its death which for some reason doesn't hurt Lara anymore. Anniversary makes the interaction a bit more personal, as the fleshy abomination actually helps Lara turn a big heavy wheel in order to reveal some necessary platforms (it's much heavier and slower when Lara has to turn it on her own later).

Finally stepping up to the entrance of the central chamber that holds the Scion, Lara merely has to pull two switches on the opposite sides in order to extend the drawbridge and open the door. In the original, there are no obstacles other than a strict time limit for each switch. In Anniversary, spike rams are mounted to each gangway. On one side she has to slip through when they're retracted, while on the other side the floor has broken down so she needs to use them as makeshift platforms. Bats attack after each switch, whereas the original had centaurs right at the entrance.

Finally Lara reaches the Scion, which in the original triggers the last vision of the old Atlantis that was seen in Anniversary earlier - the one depicting Natla's trial. Natla interrupts Lara - in her ordinary human form in 1996, but already transformed into the winged queen of Atlantis in the remake. She used to talk a lot of very nineties nonsense about the stagnation of evolution, but all that has changed to her equally clichéd attempt at drawing Lara to her side. Either way, the two end up fighting and Natla falls into the lava, while Lara manages to pull herself up a platform. Only in Anniversary Lara actually manages to destroy the Scion with a precisely placed bullet beforehand.

The abomination resulting from Natla's meddling is a terrible boss fight in the original - all Lara has to do is keep cycling around it while riddling it with countless bullets until it collapses, giving Anniversary plenty of room for improvement. As usual, Lara has to trigger the monster's rage and dodge-shoot it at the right moment - first in order to get its claw stuck in the ground so she can shoot apart its hand, then in front of the abyss so he can make it fall into the lava when it clutches onto the ledge with its remaining good hand.

In order to get back up to the Scion, Lara has to go through long corridors that are all about the utterly boring pushing of blocks, so it's understandable why Crystal Dynamics axed that part. The following lava cave relies on yet more gaps in slants and more rolling boulders in the original and yet more balancing pillars, timed switches and moving platforms in the remake. Back in the main chamber, 1996 Lara finally gets to destroy the scion and returns to the entrance hall, where falling debris has made the floor below accessible. Anniversary inserts the earlier room with the many switches and underwater doors instead, except the switches are gun targets that are covered by metal shields Lara has to pull down with her own weight and then activate the doors before they rise back up.

The final moments of 1996 Tomb Raider are actually some of the best in the entire game. They combine many known traps in new and interesting ways, forcing the player to abandon many intuitions learned so far, like a crumbling floor plate underneath a pendular blade, where she just has to keep standing in place to fall right into a tiny pond several hundred feet below. It's all a great assembly of traps, which makes it all the more disappointing that Anniversary just puts another lava cave with familiar obstacles where the only new challenge comes from making out what actually is supposed to be the next platform at one point.

Surprise, Natla is not dead. In the original she finally grows her wings, but they don't make the fight any more interesting than any of the other boring fights so far. She goes down surprisingly quickly, gets back up once and then is just as easy as the first time. In Anniversary her two phases are fought vastly differently. First she flies around hectically and Lara has to target her wings to make her fall to the ground, from where she starts throwing fireballs and warps around the room. The antidote is the same as with every boss in this game: Shoot her until she frenzies, then dodge and attack. The timing to successfuly hit the weak spot in her back is actually a lot more rigid than with any enemy before, though. And because you cannot have any triumph in an actual player-controlled scene in a 2007 action game, of course Natla needs to be finished off in a quick time event.

The final QTE drops an enormous pillar on Natla, which Lara then uses in a cutscene to escape the pyramid, but in the original she is still not done. Since QTEs hadn't been invented yet, all the pillars keep standing and she needs to climb them instead, then slide down a long slope into the ending.

In Core Design's game, Lara gets a cool "outrun the explosion" scene, but Crystal Dynamics just have her blown into the sea by the pressure wave. The remake also adds a few more shots of Lara afterwards, showing her looking at her hands once more, except she is not frowning but smiling now. Apparently that means she finally learned to like killing?

Queue the credits, with some hilariously bad CGI images to make everyone remember that it was the nineties. Anniversary instead opts for a tasteful but boring "movie like" credits scroll in front of a pitch black background. Also a hundred more people worked on it, naturally.