I can't believe how amazing it looks. To see a fan game manage to reach such quality in terms of graphics. That's certainly mind blowing.

I'll download the demo later and hope for the best this won't become another dead project like open outcast

Just stumbled upon this, watched some videos of people playing it in low resolution (1920x1080) so I thought I'd give it a whirl at a modern resolution/setup to see it first hand. It's pretty amazing to say the least, very good detail, effects etc. The engine feels unoptimized but that is extremely reasonable for an in progress demo project lead by one programmer.

Weak points:
- Battles are a bit too fast paced and in your face, hard to control where you're shooting or get away from enemies.
- Engine needs optimization work.
- Game does not handle ALT-TAB well, and generally needs to be killed from task manager and restarted after ALT-TAB.
- Game sometimes crashes after reloading a save game.

Strong points:
- Basically EVERYTHING.

It's extremely impressive considering how little manpower put it together. Lara looks fantastic, as does all the other artwork.

The sound effects are taken from the official TR games from what I gleaned. It's not clear if 3D models or other stuff was reused from one or more of the official TR games but some things seem like they might be, or might be based on official game assets of latter TR games. I fired up Underworld for some comparisons and it definitely seems like there could be some assets being reused there, but I can't be certain. He does credit Squeenix et al. This is just hypothesis based on observation however and not a critique in any way.

Bottom line, it is an amazing fan made demo regardless of how it was put together, a true feat any TR fan should give a spin for sure. Runs fine at 2560x1600 for me, any resolution is selectable in the game options screen.

That is exactly what happens in the majority of cases. Anyone wanting to use trademarked or copyrighted property in a fan made anything should always get the rights to do so officially from the IP owners first, so they don't waste months/years of their life on something that gets killed by the IP owner when it is made public. In some cases, IP owners will authorize some fan made stuff under certain conditions such as the work being completely free and no money being made at all from the creation of the work including donations etc. In other cases sometimes the game company hires the people and brings them on board, or otherwise funds them or supports them in some way. I think some of the Halflife mods and spinoffs were supported by Valve in this manner (Black Mesa, Halflife 2 Updated, etc.)

It appears that he might have approval from Crystal Dynamics according to some comments on his site or elsewhere that I read while snooping around. It might not be a legal license, but could just be an informal "as long as you do XYZ, we will leave you alone" type non-legally-binding thing. Either way though, I hope that they not only allow it, but it would be great if they hired him and gave him some extra resources and manpower to put the rest of it together in much less time and release it as an official game. Seriously, if the game was completed at the quality level the demo is now, and optimized and stabilized further, it could sell for $30+ easily IMHO.

And unfortunately only released on Steam with Denuvo attached but yeah I want the game too. How long is the demo BTW?

Just been playing for 10 minutes.

The quality of level design is amazing, Every bit as good as Anniversary.

Hats off to the developer. Really hope Square-ENIX don't get all legal on his arse.

Proper Tomb Raiding

I watched a video of a guy completing it in an hour and a half but he had very poor quality situational awareness and observation and it felt like he was playing the game with a game pad from the orthagonal robot like movements which tend to also lead to poor situational awareness compared to a mouse+keyboard player who tends to look around much more freely and see the entire environment rather than gamepad tunnelvision. He did not seek out and find all of the secret locations and bonus items etc. either though, so I'd suspect for a completionist player who likes to explore and not miss anything, and who isn't a doofus missing obvious things while staring right at them it would take anywhere from 1-2 hours to do a complete run, while someone could probably do a speed run in 20 minutes or so if they knew everything.

It basically covers the entire great wall of china level of TR2.

I tried for ten minutes and couldn't change the resolution. :P

Wow, that was unexpected. :-) Can't wait to see if this wave of remakes reaches The Last Revelation. :-)

Thanks for this, didn't even know it was being remade.

For a fan remake its very well done, just hope SE don't shut it down (i'll be amazed if they don't.)

I have one Windows machine with GT640 and 4GB of RAM around, will it reasonably work?

Looks great!! But, a DMCA will strike before a final public release, obviously....

The only thing that worries me in such a remake is the difficulty. I half foresee this remake, if it ever sees the light of day in a complete form, to be pretty easy compared to TR2. Not in terms of fighting enemies, but instead navigating and figuring out a level. To design a level to look amazing is far, far easier than designing one that manages to tread the fine line between boring simple and impossibly difficult. TR1 to TR3 at least I think managed to do this.

Go to the resolution screen, set the resolution to the desired res, then click on Apply. The Apply text is not a button and does not have any highlighting or attention drawn to it so it might be easy to miss. I also highly recommend people configure it to Fullscreen mode (not Windowed Fullscreen) as this seems to greatly improve the performance.

I'm experiencing instability though. Every time I die there is about a 90% chance it will go to a black loading screen, twiddle the hard disk briefly and then never load and I have to either hit ALT-TAB or CTRL-ALT-DEL and wait for anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes to get my desktop to pop up and kill the app. It didn't do this when I first started playing but after a second or third start of the executable. Now it does it pretty much every time I die. It also seems to corrupt save game files sometimes so save often. All in all not unexpected from a new demo/beta of something though.

Update: Screenshot attached

It only allows me to set it to the one resolution. :P Don't worry. I got rid of the demo. Not going to get jazzed up for something that will never see the light of day as a finished product.

Could be a bug perhaps, but I attached a screenie above showing how it worked for me. Also, if it is in "Windowed Fullscreen", I believe it will be restricted to your desktop resolution, make sure it is just "Fullscreen"

yeah, that's where I was. I could change all of the other sliders but that one. Must be a bug. Like you said, there are evidently several of them.