Mr. N64's Summary of the Tomb Raider Chronicles Experience

I'm all for fantasy and adventure, but the scenarios in this game are positively absurd. The first quest that Lara embarks on begins backstage of an opera house in Rome, and ends up in a secret tomb that just happens to be a few blocks away! Along the way to the treasure, Lara will encounter a giant robot head that shoots lightning from its eyes and a giant metal soldier in someone's ballroom. Thankfully, the urban streets of Rome are completely vacant during all of this.

In addition to the gameplay situations being absurd, the puzzles are often counterintuitive. For example, there is a place where Lara must use a crow bar to pry open a metal door, but the door next to it (which is merely covered by wood planks) cannot be budged with the same crowbar. I also spent over an hour looking for a switch to an ornate metal door in the ground, only to discover after consulting a guide that this particular door can simply be pried open. There were no visual cues to the door that told me this could be done, and every other similar door requires a key or a switch of some sort. What's really sad is that I had tried prying the door open and because Lara wasn't positioned exactly right, it didn't work. After the guide I consulted said that it could in fact be pried open, I had to try a few times before Lara actually opened it.

As I write this review, I am beginning the second adventure in the game. As a long time Lara Croft/Tomb Raider fan, I have found this adventure to be very upsetting. This adventure involves Lara sneaking into a German military base and massacring its soldiers (who of course shoot before talking). This transformation of Lara from Indiana Jones-like adventurer/archaeologist into a mass-murdering action star is very disheartening. Lara's character was once the best example of a modern day female hero. Now she's nothing more than an angry, busty shell that's used to sell games to pubescent teenagers. Perhaps there's still hope in the next generation Tomb Raider game that's due out next year, but given the fact that this current game appears as nonsensical and violent as Tomb Raider III, it seems that this is a trend in the series and not simply an exception.

There is supposed to be a special level at the end of Tomb Raider Chronicles that uses stealth over gunplay, but if I waited to write this review until I got that far in the game, this review would be so late as to have little value. Besides, the sequence that runs behind the title screen hints that stealth or not, this "new" part of the game is just as nonsensical and violent. One of the brief glimpses of this level features Lara sneaking up on a guard and pushing him into an active furnace. We hear him scream in pain. 

For longtime fans of the series (who may prefer the more self-defense oriented Lara of the first two TR games), there is a saving grace to this otherwise disappointing experience. The PC edition comes complete with a consumer version of the Tomb Raider level creation software.  There's a 120 page manual in Adobe Acrobat PDF format that explains everything you need to get started. It's complicated to use, but the fact that it allows you to make your own games makes up for the crummy game that it comes bundled with.

You may wonder if I'll be reviewing the Dreamcast and PSOne versions of this game as well, and the answer to that question is no. The Dreamcast's controller actually has too few buttons to make the game playable on any serious level, and the outdated graphics of the PSOne make any Tomb Raider game look painful to play when compared to a high-res 60fps PC version.

So in the end, I must make two different recommendations. Tomb Raider fans will find the level editor worth the money, but everyone else should pass this one up. I just hope that next year's "next-gen" Tomb Raider reveals that Core and Eidos have stopped degrading Lara's character, returning instead to what made her so immediately and completely likeable back when her first adventure hit the shelves.

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