Tomb Raider Chronicles – The Final Nail In Lara Croft’s Rather Shapely Coffin?

Lara Croft is dead.

What, you didn’t know? She bought the big sandy one at the end of the last episode, Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation, in a cave-in of all things. Luckily Lara doesn’t let a little thing like death stand in her way of a good time. Enter Tomb Raider Chronicles, the first of Lara Croft’s posthumous adventures. Tomb Raider Chronicles centers around a group of Croft’s friends from previous adventures chatting after her wake, recounting a few of Lara’s more memorable exploits. As the player, you’ll be playing through these tales of exploration and glorified grave robbing as Lara at various stages in her life.

For the most part, that versatile and addictive gameplay that fans remember from the prior installments remains intact. Tomb Raider Chronicles sports a healthy dose of puzzle-solving, maze-negotiating, platform-jumping, and of course, gun-toting. If you’ve played any kind of first-person adventure or shooter in the last several years, the running, jumping, climbing, and shooting controls will come naturally to you.

Control of Lara’s assortment of actions is still as smooth as ever, but Eidos still saw fit to add a few more moves to the tomb raider’s repertoire. This time around you’ll be learning to walk a tightrope, doing the new forward tumble, and flexing your skills with gymnastics-style parallel bar maneuvers. The ropewalk itself is actually rather lame, both in concept and execution. Whenever the player stumbles upon a rope that some baddie just happened to leave strung between two distant platforms, she can do her Ringling Brothers act and walk on the rope via the action button and d-pad forward. Periodically Lara will lose her balance, causing her to stop and sway to one side. It’s up to the player to help her regain her balance by tapping the d-pad in the opposite direction of the sway.

After playing some of the new breed of violent action games with more realistic gun effects, the arsenal Lara’s strapped with in Tomb Raider Chronicles now seems rather feeble and boring. Of course she has her trusty twin nine millimeter handguns always by her side (except for during the “young Lara” levels), and throughout the adventure she can pick up other weapons including a shotgun, a .38 revolver, and a Desert Eagle. Unfortunately, the sound effects for the weapons are just “pops” of varying timbre and duration. It’s a good thing that more effort went into the background music and stage sound effects – they’re excellent at setting the mood throughout the course of the game.

Even though this is the fourth installment in the Tomb Raider series, don’t expect many of the bugs that plagued the first game to have been fixed. Those classic old TR gremlins that you love to hate are still here in all their glory. You’ll find yourself reveling in the all-too-familiar frustration of getting stuck in walls in tight spaces, suffering at the hands of poor collision detection, and load times so long you’ll wonder if you’re the one in purgatory instead of Lara. Also, “Crackhead Camera” returns for more extremely poorly positioned views of difficult jumps and other significant points where actually being able to see what you’re doing is critical to your success. In fact, in places the camera position is so funky that you’ll wonder if the level designers didn’t purposely place it in such a way that it would be impossible to mark off distances and directions accurately.

What's more, it doesn’t appear as though the graphics have been updated much since the first TR either. What was stunning and groundbreaking almost ten years ago is mediocre now. Many of the backgrounds and levels are certainly attractive, but various walls and surfaces suffer from a bad case of the “jaggies” and the characters are still blocky and stiff. A graphical update should have definitely been considered for this release.

But by far, the biggest disappointment that this game will give the player is the plot. Where the other Tomb Raider adventures had linear plot progressions told through pre-recorded character interactions and CGI video, TRC has no cohesion whatsoever since the story revolves around Lara’s friends remembering some of her various unrelated exploits. The player merely leaps from a mission to mission seemingly at random, with a segue no more transitional than, “ah, that was a great story about Lara. Now I remember back when Lara…”

Despite the flaws, Tomb Raider Chronicles is still a fun outing into the supernatural, platform-filled world of Lara Croft. Gamers tired of this genre won’t find anything here to rekindle their interest, but hardcore fans of the Brit With an Attitude will enjoy a few extra adventures with the heroine. Plus, with added replayability thanks to the included level editor, this chapter doesn’t have to be the last. Her legend can be written and rewritten as many times as your imagination will allow.


P.S. – Lara’s not actually dead (like she’s really alive anyway). Look for Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness to hit the stores sometime in the next few months.