This review has been a long time coming. It's been coming since before the site you're reading this on was founded. It's been coming before some of you were even born.

To know about my relationship with Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation, you have to know something about me. I first started this game some 20 years ago, at a time when I couldn't even tie my own shoelaces. In those intervening years, many attempts to beat this game followed. Just off the top of my head, I can remember attempts in 2004, 2005, 2007, 2009, 2011, 2012, 2015 and even in 2017, a time period where I didn't play video games a lot. Yet I always came up short. After reaching the game's halfway point - which was hammered into me by rote - Tomb Raider 4 would always get the best of me. I would give up. I would quit.

In 2020, I decided that I was never going to finish this game, and I skimmed through its ending cutscenes so that I could claim that I had beaten it. But I hadn't beaten it. I was a hack, a fraud, a liar. I was practically a member of Congress.

When I started my marathon of the Tomb Raider series in January of this year, this was the game I was looking forward to most. This was my opportunity to make things right, to make the lie a truth, to beat TR4 for good - for once in my life, to get the best of this game, instead of the other way around. I proudly proclaimed to my friends that I was Captain Ahab and Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation was my white whale. Of course, nobody has actually read Moby Dick, or they'd have pointed out to me that the story ends with the whale dragging Ahab beneath the waves.

Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation was to be Lara Croft's 'final problem.' Like her detective compatriot Sherlock Holmes, the character was so popular that the creator had burned out, and decided to kill them off. This was to be her last adventure, and she was assigned an appropriately epic quest - saving the world from the scourge of Egyptian god and all-around villain Seth, whom she accidentally releases on a routine raid. Her final send-off was intended to be her biggest adventure yet: huge levels, new abilities and ever more impressive graphics were prepared to accompany her into the afterlife.

The first half of Tomb Raider 4 - up to the point I always gave up at - is the best and most definitive classic TR has ever been. With Lara's new abilities and the tightly focused levels, traversing tombs and temples has never been more fun. There's even a prologue episode with a younger Lara, setting up her rivalry with one-time mentor Werner Von Croy. There are breezy exploration segments, smartly designed puzzles, thrilling timed runs and even a few passable combat sections - something the series has always struggled with. Apart from the introduction, the whole game takes in Egypt, and as a young player, I learned a lot about its ancient mythology just from this game. The race between Lara and a Seth-possessed Von Croy over the world's fate promises a thrilling conclusion to our heroine's last huzzah.

Yet it breaks my heart to say this, but the cracks eventually do start to show. The first half's linearity allows its strong points to shine. Once you get to the point where the game has interconnected levels - almost a sort of open world, and start running into rooms that are dead ends, that's where you should swallow your pride and open a walkthrough, because now it's a lot less focused and you'll want to save your time. The second half's location of keys and gates, with nary a context clue as to what you should do next, almost turns it into a point-and-click adventure game. There are a couple of puzzles whose logic has not been figured out even today, 25 years later. There are even more platforming sections that are made just to fuck with the player. Brute force - or a guide - is the only way through. Somewhere during Tomb Raider 3's development, it seems, Core Design lost their mojo for designing skill-based platforming segments that would throw down the gauntlet and challenge players to make use of everything they'd learned - best illustrated in the endgame of Tomb Raider II. Instead, they opted just to create trial-and-error sections with an instant death on every error.

The most glaring flaw, however is that this game clearly ran out of resources in its second half. Despite the apocalyptic events taking place in the story, the environments hardly convey them. A few half-hearted attempts at showing the brewing storm are made, yet the story tells me the clouds have already burst. The final boss is anticlimactic and subdued, and the final cutscene is too rushed to carry any poignancy. It feels more like a cheap cliffhanger than the 21-gun-salute, fireworks-forming-a-union-jack, not-a-dry-eye-in-the-house send-off Lara deserves. Of course we are aware that Eidos bosses found out that Core Design were planning to kill Lara off and screamed at them about it, but all oral histories say it was too late to alter the ending, so why wasn't it made better to begin with?

There isn't even a proper credits screen - after Lara is buried alive, her rival Von Croy (now suddenly back to his usual self) having failed to save her, we are kicked back to the title screen with a staff roll. No stats screen, no 'The End,' and not even a new music track to signal the end of an era - all we get is the same 'danger music' we heard throughout the game's boss encounters (except the final showdown, which lacks gravitas in part because of how awkwardly silent it is). This has to be the worst possible choice for what's supposed to be a downer ending.

This ludonarrative dissonance takes away from the latter half of the game, and I am utterly confident that if The Last Revelation was remade today with its second half done right, it could still be the best Tomb Raider game.

I've read many reviews of TR4 over the years saying that Core Design had gotten lazy with the series, and were pumping games out annually like the new Madden or Call of Duty. I completely disagree. While Tomb Raider 4's latter half does show the hallmarks of money running out during development, of an exhausted development team, and of time constraints, I can't say the developers were lazy with it. The gameplay is the best that classic Tomb Raider has ever been - just compare how many more fan mods were built in the TR4 engine than in any other classic TR. It also looks incredible for its time, and the FMVs are among the best of the era. It's just a pity that in the end, Core Design lacked the resources to make this the farewell it should have been. Not when they had Eidos breathing down their necks.

Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation will always be my favourite classic TR, the one I have the fondest childhood memories of, the one dearest to my heart, but objectively it's not the best one. That title still goes to the original. It was also the last 'good' Tomb Raider game for several years: the next entry, Chronicles, was a collection of B-sides that was hastily cobbled together like the yearly Madden, and Angel of Darkness is remembered as a promising yet half-finished mess. That was the end of Core Design's control over Tomb Raider, and the series was handed over to Crystal Dynamics.

But hey, that gave us the Legend-Anniversary-Underworld trilogy. Sometimes when God closes a door, he does open a window.

God bless Stella and her walkthrough site. Where would we be without that woman?

This is my very first Tomb Raider game that I have played back when I was a kid when I was at least 12+ years old on my original Playstation console. I remember I couldn't even finish the tutorial level and I was sort of bothered with it I spend my own pocket money on this and I even coulnd't even beat the freaking tutorial level while paying full price for this back then. Now with looking up a walktrough video now online maybe I eventually should give this game another try and give past me a pat on the head, since apparantly I was almost at the very end of that said tutorial level. Heh.

Edit: I did end up going back to finish this game. It definitely has it's moments, but ultimately is far, far too long for it's own good and has way too much needless backtracking.

At the time of writing, I have around 20 hours in this game which if the previous three games are anything to go by, I should be around 2/3 of the way through this game. While all the prior games had their fair mix of fantastic level designs, mixed with convoluted and honestly sometimes annoying puzzle design, Tomb Raider IV: The Last Revelation just goes too far with the puzzles. With that being said, I don't think this game is nearly as enjoyable as the original trilogy and think I'll be dropping it for now.

First off what I've read, this game runs in a new engine which if you go directly from 3 to 4, is noticeable. Sure, Lara still controls like a tank but the levels in this game have much more polygons and relies less on the grid-design of the past games. This works fantastic in making more believable and interesting level designs but does occasionally lead to Lara getting stuck in the ground/walls more often. There were also 2 game-breaking bugs I encountered in the Alexandria and Cairo levels where I needed to reload saves to continue. One involved water not filling an area I needed to swim in and ice wraiths not turning water I needed to walk on into ice. Both were fixed by loading an old save and doing things different, but I never encountered bugs like these in prior games.

Undoubtedly the biggest change in this game is the fact the levels are now inter-connected. There is no Croft Manor level in this game so that functionality is now replaced by a mandatory tutorial level. With the exception of this and possibly later levels (I didn't finish the game), each area can consist of anywhere from 3-7 different levels. At first this seems great as in the first area, levels are fairly linear so if you need to backtrack, it's not difficult to do. Tedious, yes, but do-able.

However, once you get to Alexandria and Cairo (the level I gave up on this game), the amount of backtracking becomes unbearable if you don't make sure to grab every key item before moving on, an impossible task if you're playing this for the first time, obviously. I found myself very often searching every nook and cranny in a level, only to decide that I must be missing an item and go somewhere else to look for it. This would take me hours of running in circles before I would cave-in and use a guide. It's when I used a guide, I would discover that I missed 3 key items in Level 1 and another in Level 2. So in missing 4 items, I would have to backtrack to each of these levels and perform a separate puzzle to obtain each of these items, just so I could progress in Level 3, which would give me an item I need to unlock Level 4 which can only be accessed in Level 2. See why this is confusing? The game's puzzles basically can be described as:

Find Item A, B in Level 1 -- > Unlock door in Level 2 -- > Retrieve key that goes to a door in level 3 -- > Get another key to unlock another level in Level 1

I felt like I was crippling myself by not following a guide the entire time playing this game and if I am constantly needing a hint as to where to go, the game just isn't fun. Maybe I'll pick this game back up in the future but for now, I'm going to move on to AoD as this game even soured me off of Chronicles for the time being.

Что-то вдруг появилось желание пройти классические Лары Крофт (не из-за ремастера к слову). Начать решил с четвертой части, ведь её ключ можно по дешевке купить в интернете. Но теперь думаю раскошелюсь и куплю первые три части в стиме, пока не убрали.

Для первого знакомства с классической Ларой Крофт четвертая часть сработала и хорошо, и не очень. Хорошо то, что в начале тут есть какой-никакой туториал, и в первых двух локациях тебя ведут за ручку и заблудиться трудно. А вот плохо то, что позже в игре есть куча неочевидных моментов в прохождении. Больше всего я застревал на моментах, когда надо было достать предмет, который ты вообще не думал, что можно взять, или открыть дверь или люк, которые ты вообще не догадывался, что можно открывать оказывается. В Александрии и Городе Мертвых таких моментов полно. В платформинге тоже часто бывает, что смотришь на место, думаешь, ну не допрыгнуть до туда, не получается, надо искать дальше. Потом смотришь в гайд и оказывается надо туда, ты просто неправильно прыгал. Из-за этого где то 30% игры я наверное проходил с гайдом, или даже больше. Благо это у нас сейчас есть такая возможность, а как люди раньше проходили я без понятия.

В моменты, когда игра не путает тебя неочевидными вещами, играть в четвертую часть интересно. Исследование и платформинг увлекает, загадки фановые и очень интересно было их решать. Самое забавное, загадки у меня чаще всего получалось решать самому, а вот понимать куда дальше идти или куда применить или откуда взять предмет чаще всего только с гайдом. Игра к тому же очень большая в отличие от игр эпохи Legend. Вроде игра ориентирована на 17 часов, но я наиграл почти вдвое больше, 36 часов. Из-за этого четвертая часть ощущается большим приключением, мы побывали и в египетских руинах, и в греческих руинах, и на поезде, и в охваченном саранчой арабском городе, и в пирамидах. При этом мне игра не показалась затянутой, хотя к концу я честно уже подустал.

От игры по итогу получил много фана, она меня смогла затянуть, хоть я и много тупил, благо гайд в помощь. Хорошая часть, видел от некоторых людей к ней хейт, пока не совсем понимаю за что. Думаю в прошлых частях неочевидных моментов не меньше.

I wanted to like this game, but goddamn is it long. The puzzles are obtuse and I find what you can and cannot do in the game world to be very unclear. It's also incredibly dark in many of the tomb sections, even with the right image settings. There were moments where I got stuck for up to 30 minutes when a lever was right in front of me the entire time but I couldn't see it because of how it blended in with the terrain textures. I don't know, maybe I'm just stupid but I had a really hard time with TR4, and I can't do it anymore.

Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation - Review

Tomb Raider the Last Revelation is very much Core Designs swansong to the PlayStation 1 era. It very much feels like they have taken everything they have learnt from the last three games and produced a near perfect (original era) Tomb Raider game, moulded from the first three games.

Despite its success on the sales front Tomb Raider 3 struggled to gain the critical acclaim of the first two titles, so one year later we have Tomb Raider: TLR. Lara Croft was as much of a pop culture phenomenon back in 1999 as she was a year before and the hype surrounding this game in 1999 was like nothing we’d seen before in video games. Was the hype justified or was Tomb Raider: TLR a let-down? Let’s find out.

The first thing you’ll notice is that this Tomb Raider does feel different to the previous three. Gone are they old menus, replaced with more conventional style while we are shown clips of the game in the background. Croft manor has also been removed, in part due to the lack of disk space on a CD but also as Core felt they had done all they could with that setting in the last three games.

Core have brought in professional story writers from TV and movies this time around and it really shows. The story opens in Angkor Wat in 1984, when Lara Croft is 16. She and her mentor, Werner Von Croy, are exploring ancient ruins, searching for an ancient artefact called the Iris. They find it, but Lara finds inscriptions that warn of terrible retribution for any who disturb the artefact. Von Croy ignores the warnings and the temple begins to close. Lara is forced to run, leaving him trapped inside.

In 1999, Lara and a local guide are searching for the Tomb of Seth, hoping to find the Amulet of Horus. Upon removing it from a sarcophagus, she finds that the amulet is the key to sealing the dark god Seth away for eternity. Horus and his ally Semerkhet constructed the sarcophagus to hold Seth and that, by removing the amulet, Seth has been released. Her guide is revealed to be working for Von Croy, who is determined to take the amulet for himself. Lara quickly escapes after being chased by Von Croy's mercenaries. Lara must work to re-seal Seth away before he destroys the world and stop Von Croy from taking it for himself.

This is easily the best story in the Tomb Raider series up to this point and the addition of professional writers really shows. Told again through FMV and in game cutscenes the story moves at an almost perfect pace and keeps you far more invested than in previous titles. The ending (as I’m sure you all know) is a huge cliff-hanger and one that kept fans talking for years, right up to the release of Angel of Darkness.

One of the key differences with TR:TLR is that apart from the first level, the game is based entirely in Egypt, rather than a globe hopping adventure as before. My initial fears with this were quickly eased as the level design is almost second to none. Each area of the game feels different with great lighting, architecture and new puzzles to explore. Levels are now spread over multiple loading screens and back tracking is now required to complete objectives. For example one level has a tomb door that requires you to go to three different levels to collect part of the key and return each time. This helps lend a bit of believability to the levels that feel far more like you would expect a Tomb to feel. It’s a linier game than Tomb Raider 3 was but levels are not as linier as they were in Tomb Raider 1 & 2 striking an almost perfect balance.

TLR features many new moves. Lara can now grab hold of ropes dangling from the ceiling and swing from them. These can be used to cross large gaps. She can climb up and down ropes and poles also. She can now shimmy around corners unlike in previous titles. Lara herself in this instalment has a smoother, more refined appearance. This is due to moving and flexible joints between meshes, creating a more realistic approach to the heroine. You can also combine items such as puzzle pieces and there are different ammo types for the shotgun as well as other weapons. Lara can upgrade weapons as well, such as adding a sight to the new revolver and crossbow allowing for first person aiming.

Tomb Raider the Last Revelation was meant to be Core designs final Tomb Raider game before they turned their attention to a next generation Tomb Raider title and it shows. This for me is the perfect balance of all that the original games brought to the table. Combat is great with new and old weapons but not over the top as it was in Tomb Raider 2. Exploration is fun and diverse but not as “all over the place” as it was in Tomb Raider 3 and despite 95% of the game being set in Egypt the level design moulds and changes well throughout the game, unlike the original games repetitive environments.

However if you have not liked Tomb Raider up to this point you’re not going to enjoy TLR. It’s a near perfect example of what the original Tomb Raider series was and a great way to bow out for Lara and Core design. Sadly they would be forced to make one more title prior to working on their next gen Tomb Raider game but we will get to that another time. If you like the original Tomb Raider series you own it to yourself to pick this up as for me it’s the best in the series.
PC – 9.2 PS1 – 9.1

This is where Tomb Raider really started to go downhill. As we know, the team at Core was starting to get very weary of making games in the same series. This was the fourth game in four years, and it shows. There are plenty of very convoluted puzzles and some levels are overly long. The lack of a partitioned off tutorial section was a loss for sure, as the in-game tutorial is a bit long, and feels unnecessary if you're already a pro at playing these games. The UI feels pretty uninspired, too. The loss of the ring menus made it feel like TR was losing its identity.

Still, the setting in Egypt was interesting, if a bit uninspired, since we've visited Egypt before in the series. Though, actually going into tombs again was a nice change of pace. Unfortunately, the setting can get a bit boring at times, as the games up until this series wisely changed up locales to keep things interesting.

In the end, it feels like the team was not here for the game, because they did try to kill off Lara on purpose.