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?
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?
6 Comments
@wollom There are two. one is the East Gate Hieroglyph Puzzle, as detailed here: https://tombraiders.net/stella/walks/TR4walk/28-under-sphinx.html
Another is later in the same level, where despite there being symbols on the walls in a huge underwater maze, there is nothing to point you as to what is the right order to do the maze in. But you do have to do it in an order or drown.
Another is later in the same level, where despite there being symbols on the walls in a huge underwater maze, there is nothing to point you as to what is the right order to do the maze in. But you do have to do it in an order or drown.
A+ for the literary references alone. Interesting but also disheartening to hear that you found its second half so dissjointed. Gives me motivation to pick up TR4 again after I had a bit of break now, just to see how I might compare it to my own experience with the game.
Lets see if my point-and-click adventure game punished mind cant figure out how these 25 year old puzzles work. I might have a real shot. Cant be worse than Kings Quest V, where you have to carrie a rmd ass pie up a mountain to a throw at a Yeti before he kills you. This is a real "puzzle" btw, if you do anything else with that exact Pie (you can do lots of usless things with it of course) or forget to pick it up.... the game can not be completed. I love old adventure games.
Lets see if my point-and-click adventure game punished mind cant figure out how these 25 year old puzzles work. I might have a real shot. Cant be worse than Kings Quest V, where you have to carrie a rmd ass pie up a mountain to a throw at a Yeti before he kills you. This is a real "puzzle" btw, if you do anything else with that exact Pie (you can do lots of usless things with it of course) or forget to pick it up.... the game can not be completed. I love old adventure games.
@novaniles goofy ahh pie story
Your Tomb Raider reviews are making me want to replay the games and actually try to finish them which I know is going to cause me to have a nervous breakdown so could you stop making your reviews so compelling please??
@Tayter Thank you, that's very kind of you :)
Wollom
21 days ago