Lara, you are a valuable asset – Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation

[Throughout this project, I will be handing over to the viewpoints of others for guest posts. For this one I welcome back David C James, who previously wrote about Jurassic Park. You can find David at pixelhunted.com and on twitter as @PixelHunted]

**Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation** (Core/Eidos, PlayStation, 1999)

Let’s get one thing straight: I really like classic Tomb Raider. I like the way it doesn’t hold your hand, I like the grid-based ‘tank’ movement and I really like the isolated, spooky ambience. On paper, Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation delivers all this and more: a delicious all-you-can eat buffet of archeological adventure. In practice? I kinda hate it and think it’s by far the worst of the five ‘classic’ games.

Released in November 1999, The Last Revelation was the fourth Tomb Raider game in four years. From a modern perspective, a studio delivering an AAA experience in consecutive years sounds insane. Tomb Raider managed this by only making very minor technological and gameplay improvements to each new instalment and by working Core Design developers to the bone.

By the time of The Last Revelation they were fed up. Sure, Lara Croft had bought them houses and cars, but they came at the cost of the developers’ personal relationships, happiness and sanity. As such, they planned for this to be her final adventure: the death of Lara Croft. In an interview with RetroGamer, designer Andy Sandham explained:

“We all wanted to kill Lara. Looking at Lara’s avatar all day every day for two years was about as much as some of us could take. Management were pretty hands off, so for two weeks, we hatched a plan to kill Lara, and followed it through to fruition. By ‘fruition’ I mean [Jeremy Heath-Smith, Core Design CEO] finding out we had killed her and it was too far gone to reverse it, and taking us into his office and shouting at us.”

With their weariness of the character and studio fatigue, you might expect The Last Revelation to be a quick n’ dirty cash grab. Far from it. To their credit, Core Design clearly decided to go out with a bang. This is by far the biggest Tomb Raider yet, cramming in 35 gargantuan levels that, in a series first, connect to one another. This means that the solution to one level may be found in another, which cranks up the puzzle complexity beyond anything seen so far in the series.

It’s a nice idea, but for me it boiled down to aimlessly wandering in circles through giant maps with little-to-no idea of where I was supposed to go or what I was supposed to be doing. You might pick up an item in one corner of a sprawling level that can only be used two levels away – and there’s no in-game map to point you in the right direction. I’m not a fan of modern games leading by players by the nose with waypoints, but this gets ridiculous. By the mid-way point I had to give up and consult a walkthrough, if only because I was sick of the endless backtracking.

On top of that there’s a huge mid-game dip in quality with the ‘Cairo’ section. Classic Tomb Raider is at its best when in tombs (as they, like the game, tend to be made of big square blocks) and at its worst when trying to recreate a modern city. These levels are dark, ugly and full of guys with guns – the bane of these games.

It all goes to show that more is not necessarily better. It’s sad as The Last Revelation obviously had a tonne of effort poured into it and feels like a genuine attempt to evolve the franchise’s formula. This doesn’t happen – the end product is just more Tomb Raider as opposed to better Tomb Raider.

Perversely, Tomb Raider: Chronicles – released a year later and dismissed at the time as a tired, dated cash grab – has aged a hell of a lot better, if only because the levels are shorter and simpler. And of course, looming in the (distant) horizon is the disastrous Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness, in which the same ambitions to push the boundaries of Lara’s adventures went totally awry and ultimately killed the studio.

If there’s a lesson here, it’s to not kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. Classic Tomb Raider never got any better than the second instalment. If Core Design had been allowed some breathing space after that to iterate, improve and develop new technology, maybe they’d still be with us.

As it stands I’d avoid The Last Revelation. It’s not exactly a bad game, but if you’re craving classic Tomb Raider action you’re better off playing any other entry from the initial five.