There is a huge amount of fan made levels and campaigns for classic TR games. And that scene is very much alive and new content is being released although comparatively few people seem to be aware of it (including this place, there are large and long running threads for Doom, thief, Quake etc content but I have never seen anyone mentioning TR related stuff).
This means that you always have an alternative for more 90s style TR... as long as you can handle 90s TR controls.
Yeah the Tomb Raider level creation community is putting out levels at a breakneck pace, similar to Doom WADs. There is, of course, a lot of shit but also a lot of genuinely good stuff.
The best place to start is the Hall of Fame:
http://hof.trle.net/entriesbyyear.php
And the top levels of the month:
https://www.trle.net/pTopM.php
The best part of TR fan levels is that you can just download, unzip, and play them. They all come with the game's exe included and run as their own separate game. That's why in the reviews, people will often refer to these as "game" rather than "level pack" or "mod".
One of my favorites is Himalayan Mysteries by Titak:
https://www.trle.net/sc/levelfeatures.php?lid=1793
Solid little campaign with several levels, good puzzles and a bit of action.
Changing topic a little, I have wondered for years now how a true modern Tomb Raider game might work. The atmosphere of the originals could be replicated - whether the unsettling loneliness and mystery of Tomb Raider 1 or the more action-oriented setpiece-driven excitement of Tomb Raider 2. But how could the actual mechanics be implemented?
The world being made of cubes and grids in the original games was perfect. Players became familiar with it fast, and the rules of movement - Lara can jump about two cubes in height, for example, and she can jump about three (don't quote me on that) grid spaces if a running jump is performed. The player can therefore quickly analyse environments and make determinations - "I could jump up onto this pillar, but I'd never be able to clear the jump to that door over there, so maybe I should try a backflip onto that other pillar instead and see what I can see from up there", and so on. The player also knows that literally any ledge in the game can be climbed on if there's enough space for Lara to grab it, and can therefore plan climbs accordingly.
How do you do that nowadays? People would never accept the tank-controls control scheme or the blocky graphics necessary for a cohesive gameplay system like the originals had. Crystal Dynamics chose to really fuck it up by making movement floaty and weird, and making Lara actually magnetise onto grabbable surfaces. Worse, very few surfaces are actually interactive, and the ones that are are heavily signposted visually, so the game becomes a pointless exercise in grabbing the practically-glowing ledges that the developers have created for you and jumping to the next glowing ledge. Oops, you missed! Don't worry, you magnetised onto it anyway. But I don't know how else they might have been able to do it - there are some modern games that allow the player to climb on almost any terrain (Assassin's Creed Odyssey, for example) but it doesn't seem like it'd be easy to design puzzles around.
There are ways of doing it, but the current approach is completely fucking stupid. Only the ledges that look like someone smeared chalk on them can be grabbed!! What a load of crap, really reduces the platforming and environmental puzzling aspects of TR.
First, you need to make every ledge grabbable, every surface walkable. No invisible walls, no ledges that can't be grabbed because the designer forgot to designate it as such. Original TR not only had the block-based architecture, it also had universal rules that applied to every single surface in the same way. All ledges can be grabbed as long as they are straight, and you can shimmy along the edge until you hit a part that's angled. You can pull yourself up onto any surface. If a slope exceeds a certain angle, you will slide down. There are no exceptions, these rules are universal. Artificial signposts like chalk-smeared walls aren't necessary, because the environment is fully consistent in how it works.
Then you also need consistent movement for Lara. Jumping distance while standing, jumping distance while running, etc. Movement in TR is very accurate and always consistent, you don't walk a single step further than you intend to. When you let go of the movement key, Lara stops immediately.
The same system can work perfectly fine even without the block-based architecture. When I play TR, I don't count blocks, I just look at the distance and go with my gut feeling on whether I can make that jump or not. In 99% of cases, that feeling is right, because you tend to develop a sense for distances when you play it a while. You grow familiar enough with Lara's movesets that you can easily intuit where you will land after a jump. There are modern 2D precision platformers that also work perfectly fine without having a strictly grid-based architecture.
You just need to have level design that is high in visual clarity, which is sadly lacking in most modern games.
but I still vastly prefer classic Lara as a character. Due to the heavy use of her as a sex symbol in the marketing of the time, many people today who aren't very familiar with the original games believe that classic Lara was just a "polygon doll" and only the reboots gave her any sort of personality.
