Tomb Raider IV-VI Remastered

I am approaching this from the perspective of videogame restoration and enhancement. The attention to detail is simply mindboggling. If you already played the originals, like me, this offers the same welcome selection of graphical and QoL improvements as the first remaster. You get the option to unlock FPS and switch between original and enhanced graphics on the fly. Much the same as the first game. There are some glitches at launch, the game crashed once in the 2 hours I played so far, but I am confident this will be fixed, same as it was with the first game. But, for me, what is most incredible is the amount of detail that the developers have put into finding, digging up, polishing, and adding content that was either cut, or is in too low a quality to the extent that they sometimes physically went to museums to take photos of the objects that are in the game or tracking down photos that were only visible in the game for a couple of seconds. For example this version includes Korean release staff credits, for which the developers had to track down a physical copy of the manual. This is a real example of game preservation.

TLDR: AOD is borked like the original and some light censoring/moderation going on. Was mostly buying it for AOD, but the amount of bugs made it so i couldnt progress past the section where you need to escape from the police in the begining. I can take Jank, but even when a restart of the game does not reset the bug, its just not worth it. I will buy it when its discounted and hopefully patched a bit. Other than that, it seems to be on par with the 1-3 remaster. Also a bit censored from what i could tell, not making a fuzz about that, but it is censored/moderated in some bits.

Seeing TRIV in its new glory is enough to make me want to cry happy tears. They listened to the fans and made it even more fantastic than the previous collection.

I started with TLR (TR4), and made it about 2/3 the way through before running into unfinished content. It's like Lara runs down an alley and the world slides back 3 generations or 25 years in fidelity in an instant. Reportedly, Chronicles isn't as bad; I wouldn't know. And reportedly AoD is still janky; again, I wouldn't know. And reportedly people like me "should be patient" and "wait for a patch." I was once paid money to beta test games in active development. TLR needs some people like me in dev and QA to polish this. Aside from the small issue of the game shipping half a year ahead of being ready for market, the game is also lit flatly. It lacks volumetric effects in many places, and because textures are lit by light sources rather than illuminated per object, the world appears dark or washed out or grey depending on how much light is present. The original design popped, with light and dark being used to convey all sorts of information to the player. In these remasters, much of this design language is lost. If I had a magic wand and the inclination to fix this effort, I'd take all the upscaled assets and import them into the original lighting engine so that we can see some contrast in the game world again. I'd also sort out Lara's model which is sorely lacking hips and resembles a prefect/hall monitor rather than an athletic woman. The scope for how good IV-VI could be is capped at a 4 for me, as they'll never revisit their design stage and address the lighting problem. A real pity and missed opportunity.