With this package highly realistic water effects and avalanches were created offline, recorded as Bink videos, and dynamically merged into real-time cutscenes to display visual effects that would be otherwise impossible to render. Of the many additions, Crystal Dynamics' use of Side Effects' Houdini software is the most impressive. Physically Based Rendering gives materials a natural look under all conditions, HDR and adaptive tone mapping create stunningly bright zone transitions and highlights, deferred lighting with localised Global Illumination increases the realism of lighting, volumetric lighting adds God Rays and other shafts of light, dynamic color grading gives artists control over the appearance of individual areas, reactive water enables dynamic water ripples game-wide, physically correct forward lighting enables translucencies to be accurately lit, particle lighting enables particles to be dynamically lit by light from their surroundings, and Subsurface Scattering and Backscattering increases the quality of lighting on characters' skin. However, Lara Croft Go and Lara Croft and The Guardian of Light are some of the best games set in Tomb Raider's universe, and signs that there are still exciting, strange places for the series to go.Rise of the Tomb Raider launches on Steam and the Windows Store today, sporting exclusive PC enhancements in addition to a bevy of other improvements, making Lara Croft's latest outing a graphical tour de force, just like 2013's Tomb Raider.Ĭrystal Dynamics' Foundation Engine returns for the sequel with upgrades galore. As always, let us know your thoughts in the comments, or at least in the comments of whatever aggregation website brought you here.ġ of 11 Honorable Mention:: Tomb Raider has had a number of spin-off games that are mostly duds. With tomorrow’s release of Rise of the Tomb Raider, we’ve decided to rank the main Tomb Raider games from worst to best. It’s a bit of a shame then that the quality of the series is so wildly inconsistent, with games that are fantastic thrill-rides and others that are just meandering bores. Tomb Raider was quite simply a revolutionary game. The original game was celebrated for its beautiful graphics and for the ways that the player could interact with the environment (climbing ledges, swimming). The original was an action-adventure game that really felt like an adventure, living beyond being a mere imitation of Indiana Jones by putting a strong, clever Lara Croft up front as its protagonist and focusing on puzzle-solving and globetrotting. Tomb Raider is important for a myriad of reasons.

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