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NOW THE PROBLEM WITH the previous Tomb Raider game, the Last Revelation, was that it was badly paced and seemingly endless. Having spent five hours flicking switches and pulling levers while travelling backwards and forwards over three indistinguishable levels searching for the fantabulous artifact, you finally acquire it and all it does is slot into an alcove and open up a mundane looking door which leads onto another set of levels ... featuring exactly the same kind of thing ... the only relief coming at the end of the whole adventure when Lara apparently died under a ton of rubble. It was pretty much the same flat-paced experience offering no adrenal sense of achievement all the way through.
Thankfully the fifth game, Tomb Raider: Chronicles, is nothing of that sort, being a bright and breezy collection of four of Lara's past adventures all linked together by some friends attending her memorial service. While Von Croy searches for her in Egypt, her butler Winston, Father Dunstan and an unnamed individual regail each other with stories of her past adventures after the service. Each tale then becomes an independent, short three or four level adventure for the player to guide Lara through, as opposed to the long, gruelling campaigns that the other TR games have been. The upshot of this is that the game feels (and really is) far too short -- it has taken me only ten hours or so to complete all thirteen levels (presumably this is why a level editor was also included this time around -- as a 'make weight' to justify the full retail price).
The first mission takes place in Rome and features Lara's quest to find the Philosopher's Stone and the attempts by two old antagonists from the first Tomb Raider game, Larson and Pierre, to take it from her. A second adventure sees her infiltrate a Russian sea base and ultimately ends up with her diving to the ruins of a U-Boat to hunt for the Spear of Destiny in a fancy yellow diving suit. Father Dunstan then relates a tale in which he and Lara take on an island full of demons, imps, and ghosts when she was only 16. This level features no gun-play at all, but just straight out puzzle-solving in some gloriously coloured and designed landscapes (despite being done in the usual TR lego-block type environment).
The final adventure is probably one of the series' best ever moments: three levels of stealth infiltration of a high-tech tower block in an effort to steal back the Iris seen in TRLR. The best point about this is that Lara is finally limited to one gun, a rapidly dwindling ammo supply and a slinky black catsuit -- no more of those horrendous pistols with the unlimited ammo. It's just a pity that it took until the fifth game in the series before the developers finally realised that limiting her ability to fight might present an interesting challenge in itself rather than treating the gun-play as just something to break up the puzzles.
As is usual in Tomb Raider, some of the puzzles themselves appear mind-bogglingly obscure in their trials and solutions. An example is the talking, hanged corpse on the Haunted Island level who asks the 16 year old Lara to find his heart and return it to him, but in the end all that happens is that she ends up slapping the heart into an alcove to open up the door to the next, utterly unrelated, level. Other puzzles, however, are quite neatly solved -- a code needed to gain access to the next part of a level can be found on a card picked up on a shelf. You then have to go to the inventory screen to read the number on the card, which is much better than the basic TR method of just pulling generic switches to open obscure doors. |
