Total Conversion:
Tomb Raider vs. Tomb Raider Anniversary

The Sanctuary of the Scion starts with a big set of stairs in both versions. In the original Lara can just climb up some blocks at the end to get outside, but Anniversary adds a puzzle with interconnected movable pillars, where she has to match the positions of the figures painted on their sides according to the wall murals.

Either way Lara ends up at the back of the head of a large sphinx statue and has to climb down, only to find out that the door at the front is sealed.

Thus a climb along the outer walls of the cave ensues, where the remake makes extensive use of cracked round pillars, a feature Core Design could only dream of in 1996. At the top Lara encounters winged Atlantis monsters for the first time, but only in Anniversary they can also shoot fireballs, which are super annoying when they hit her, as they leave her stumbling around for several meters.

The added filler trap corridor here deserves special mention because it is one of the rare instances that forces Lara to make clever use of her rare crouching abilities by ducking under the crushing walls.

At the top of the cave walls Lara can find exits to two puzzle rooms. In the original Tomb Raider this means more typical platforming at one side and moving blocks at the other. Anniversary invents a new room where Lara can hang onto stone plates, climbing higher up as they descent into the water, until they get locked in place by scarab latches. This raises a set of pillars with pyramid tops, and only if all four are raised Lara can activate a mechanism that reflects light in between them to open the next door. It's an interesting change of the formula - at least the first time around, as the other side is almost exactly the same, only with a few of the platforming elements changed. In both games the ankhs that unlock the sphinx door are guarded by Atlantean creatures - centaurs in the original and mummies in the remake.

But even with the ankhs from both side chambers, Lara cannot just walk up to the door, but needs to climb the sphinx again to insert them at the sides of the head. The remake makes things much easier, as the spaces for the ankhs are just on both sides next to the door.

Anniversary lets Lara roll another stone ball down a long slope, where she can squash a few rats with it. But it's faster to just run down and shoot them on the way (or not), cause there's nothing actually to be done with the ball.

The passage beneath the sphinx leads to a huge flooded cave with statues of the Egyptian gods Horus and Anubis - which for some reason change places in between versions. Lara has to dive to the bottom to pull a lever, which drains part of the water. In the original the current takes her up into a room, which she climbs to come out above the heads of the statues. She then can climb back down carefully, or just leap into the water. In the remake, Lara instead stays below and has to climb up the statues, which is interrupted by two "puzzles" where she just has to shoot the scarab statues at the wall to match the decorated floor plates, which practically only exist to put the manual aiming to some use.

The exit through the statue reveals a long slope upwards, which leads back to the level starting point where a new door opens up - at least in the original. Eleven years later the direct destination is a room full of huge pillars. Shared by both versions is the large attack of Atlantean creatures, one of the most dangerous fights so far. Anniversary then includes a longer platforming sequence using cracks in the pillars. This way Lara reaches a pair of switches, which are activated by the previous two Scion pieces, unlocking the sanctuary that is home to the final part. The remake in turn omits the subsequent fight against Larsson, who finally meets his end in the original.

With the final part of the Scion, Lara heads outside to combine them. In Anniversary this triggers another vision of the old Atlantis, where the traitor queen is revealed as none other than Natla herself. This vision actually comes much later in the original - inserting it here provides at least an explanation why Lara lets herself get captured by Natla's henchmen like a putz and all her weapons taken away. Whereas her escape is extremely badly staged in the original - she just wiggles free without facing any notable attempt at stopping her and jumps down the canyon into the river below - the remake turns it into another quick time event where she evades the hoodlums' attacks.

The motorcycle chase after Natla's ship is almost exactly the same in both versions - once again no playable ride, but Anniversary once again does a better job at explaining how Lara managed to catch up with the ship, as she catches it with the grappling hook.

After leaving the ship, Lara finds herself in Natla's mines, where she starts out in another wet cave. In both versions the path is hidden behind the waterfall. In the original, Lara has to pull a switch there to open up a door leading to another switch back down below at the other side of the underground lake, which opens the door that lets her jump to the next area. At this point pulling remote switches to activate faraway mechanisms makes it increasingly hard to suspense disbelief, since Lara is now dealing with supposedly practical installations instead of ancient contraptions built to keep intruders away. Maybe that's why the remake replaces the entire sequence with platforming over some hanging crates to get up the waterfall.

In the next area, Lara's attention is drawn to a shack in each version, which hangs on a crane in the old game and has a container hanging above it instead in the remake. Either way, Lara has to operate the crane, but the three fuses for the controls are missing.

In the old game, Lara ends up in a room with rolling boulders, where she has to climb along a ledge for a very specific part of the way in order to prevent one of the boulders from rolling down a slope and blocking the way to the first fuse, for which there is no proper explanation at all. This entire room is also reset if Lara leaves and re-enters it, which goes against how the entire game had worked so far. Then she has to get back to the room with some barricaded shacks, where she pulls a wooden crate near one of them so she can get up the roof, fall down a crumbling plate where a switch for some reason causes the boat in the cave entrance to swim backwards a bit and serve as a springboard to a room with iron Natla blocks. These hide a switch to pull back a drill elsewhere. Behind it is another Natla block she needs to climb in order to reach another switch opens up a door back near the shack area, which turns on a conveyor belt with the next fuse. But first she needs to go to the large cave behind the Natla block, grab the last fuse and escape from the attacking cowboy, as she doesn't have her guns yet. All three fuses together make the hovering shack crash down to the ground, which blows out its door, revealing Lara's trusty twin pistols. The whole thing doesn't make a whole lot of sense, and it's actually possible to skip it, go well beyond the next point of no return, save there and screw up your game beyond repair before running into a wall in form of insurmountable enemies with no weapons.

Anniversary cleans up this entire mess by a rigid sequence. Each fuse actually allows using one more button on the crane controls, which opens up the way to some more platforming leading to the next fuse. The first one is reached quite easily just on top of a minecart, the second behind a regular platforming sequence and the third introduces some moving machinery for surprisingly creative platforming. The final button then lowers the container to crash the roof of the shack. To prevent the sequence break from the original, Lara actually has to use her guns immediately to shoot a glass window and get to the switch that puts the drill on its track, which is then used to smash a wooden barrier.

Lara then can go shoot the cowboy goon in the large cave, except the character doesn't even exist in Anniversary. Instead Larsson - whom Core Design killed off earlier - shows up to steal one of the fuses and block Lara's way. He doesn't actually threaten her this time and just wants to hinder her progress, but Crystal Dynamics uses more QTEs to make the player complicit in Lara murdering him in cold blood. She then gets to frown at her hands again like she did in Tomb Raider Legend to show you the full emotional and moral depth of this story about a lady Indiana Jones who shoots T-rexes and fights ancient Atlantean gods.

Another change at this point is the order in which Lara retrieves her weapons - while the cowboy was wielding the Magnum guns, Larsson carries a shotgun instead. The 50 Caliber guns (Anniversary's copyright-free replacement for the Magnums) are actually just a pickup that can be easily missed this time around.

After the fight, Lara has to do several leaps of faith in quick succession on barely visible sliding slopes and some more climbing in order to get to a lava cave, whereas Anniversary shortens this part and lets her just step into it, but the cave itself is a bit more elaborate.

Then Lara has to push a TNT crate the longest way a crate ever has to be pushed around in this game in order to make it a platform, do some short but very difficult and dangerous platforming (difficult because it requires precise diagonal jumping, which isn't as easily calculated in the stiff Tomb Raider engine), pull another switch to somehow make the TNT crate blow up and open up a new passage. Next Lara has to fight the UZI-wielding kid goon on his skateboard and dodge a lot of magma boulders. Then follows a climb up some standard rocks and pushing a lot more blocks and pulling levers inside some clay structure. Anniversary drastically shortens this part, only including the climb up the stone wall.

In front of the pyramid, Lara has to fight the big guy with his shotgun, retrieving her final weapon. (It's actually possible to get one through a secret in the lava cave earlier.) Since Lara already got the shotgun from Larsson, he attacks with a knife instead. He is fought together with the skateboard-less kid goon in another QTE, but the two actually finish each other off in the end. By the way, Lara's intelligent leg animations when walking over uneven terrain make it possible to get some rather troubling poses of her standing above killed enemies.

In both version Lara has to climb the pyramid to open it. Originally this was done by using a few gaps in the highly slanted wall, which lead to the triangular key for the door. The remake does this in a fancier fashion, so Lara now has to jump across the many poles that stick out of its surface. Some of them bear letters from a lost alphabet, and those sink into the pyramid when stepped on. Only after all of the glowing letters appeared on the door, the switch in an alcove at the top opens it.