Review: Tomb Raider: Chronicles

Reviewed By: Kirk Hiner

Review Date: July 11, 2001

Genre: Third person action/adventure

Format: CD

Developer: Eidos Interactive and Core Design

Mac Port: Westlake Interactive

Publisher: Aspyr

System Requirements: MacOS 8.6, 266MHz PowerPC, 32MB RAM, 4X CD-ROM, hardware 3D acceleration (Rage Pro, Rage 128 or better), QuickTime 3.0 (4.0 included)

Additional Level Editor Requirements: 1024x768 monitor resolution in 16-bit color mode, 300MB uncompressed hard disk space

Network Feature: No

3Dfx Support: OpenGL

Mac OS X Compatible: Yes

Retail Price: $39.95

Availability: Out Now

Rating: T for Teen

My soul is gone, and how it fares
Nobody knows, and nobody cares

So spoke a dead guy hanging from a tree—a hole the size of a basketball in his chest—in a particularly creepy level of Tomb Raider: Chronicles. He was, of course, speaking of his actual soul, which a young Lara Croft would have to find. However, the same can be said of my social life when a new Tomb Raider game is out.

The timing couldn't have been worse, actually, as Tomb Raider: Chronicles was released a day before I returned from my honeymoon. Would it be acceptable for me to begin my new life of wedded bliss in front of a computer screen? How could I get through the game at a decent clip and not have Tieraney already filing for divorce? Simple; set her up with Tomb Raider III on her iMac.

That done, I was able to devote ample time to Ms. Croft's latest adventures. There are four this time around, each being recounted by one of the three men gathered at her house after her memorial service. After all, Lara's dead, right? She fell to certain death at the end of Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation, didn't she? Didn't she?! Well, Werner Von Croy, digging for signs of Lara in Egypt, may provide the answer. In the meantime, her friends have some pretty good stories to tell.

By now, most are familiar with the Tomb Raider routine. You control the infamous Lara Croft from third person point of view, running, flipping, dodging, jumping, crawling and shooting her way through more exotic locales than an Emmanuelle movie on late night Cinemax. Chronicles takes you from the streets of Rome to a German U-boat to a haunted island to a high-rise office complex. A couple of these levels are actually pretty refreshing in the aging Tomb Raider realm, but I'll get to that later. Lets first take a look at the new features.

The box brags up tightrope walking, parallel bar swinging, and a hand-to-hand stealth attack. The tightrope walking is decent enough, but rarely used throughout the game. The parallel bars proved quite a bit more useful, and...well, watching Lara swing 'round and 'round on the bar grows boring after about three or four flips, but becomes highly entertaining after thirty or forty. If only Janet Jones could've swung that long in American Anthem.

The real let-down was the stealth attack. Perhaps it's still the Oni in me, but I was expecting to sneak up on some hapless guard, get him in a strangle hold, and flip him across Lara's back into a water cooler or something. Nope. By "stealth attack," Eidos means "cut scene." Basically, Lara walks up behind someone, chooses the proper weapon from her inventory, then watches a movie of herself hitting him with a crowbar or suffocating him with chloroform. This begs the gaming geek question...who would win in a fight, Lara or Konoko?

And hey, why are all the guards in these games men? Don't women work for evil megalomaniacs too?

Anyway, Tomb Raider: Chronicles also boasts a slightly more elaborate inventory system, allowing Lara to combine more items to achieve the usual results; unlocking doors or killing people. She can also search through files, drawers and shelves for useful items, but in a traditional tomb raider fashion; there's no hint that a drawer may contain anything until she searches it, so she basically has to search them all. This is no big deal, however, because the shelves and cabinets that may contain items are obviously searchable. Good thing, because Lara will need the extra ammo and health packs she finds; her enemies no longer drop these items after she kills them.

So okay, we've got the typical movement and weapon upgrades, none of which drastically alter the gameplay but do make the previous games seem drab. How about the levels? Tomb Raider: Chronicles takes an about-face from The Last Revelation which took place entirely in Egypt. This time we get the four completely different locales mentioned earlier, all of which are strangely short. In fact, this may be the shortest Tomb Raider of them all, which is too bad because a couple of these levels are the most inventive yet.

Take, for instance, the Haunted Island. In this level, we once again control a young, precocious Lara Croft setting out on one of her first adventures. The ponytail is replaced with pigtails, and her weapons are replaced with...nothing. That's right, three entire levels without even her trusty pistols. To save herself from leprechauns (or are they evil Pillsbury Dough Boys?), invisible sword fighting skeletons and such, Lara has to rely on only her wits and a wealth of med packs. I could've played the entire game this way and been satisfied.

On the other hand, there's the Iris Artifact adventure. This comprises three very difficult levels in which Lara must steal said Artifact and then escape from a high-rise office complex. She's aided this time by a security specialist named Zip who offers her advice over a headset she wears throughout the adventure. There's great potential here, but sadly, Lara and Zip's witless banter makes that of John Blade and J.C. in Sin Gold sound like a conversation between Garrison Keillor and Noël Coward over tea. And you know, I understand that Lara is all attitude and business, but in order to get all of the secrets on one of these levels, she has to kill an unarmed guard who's basically pleading for his life. Not the sort of behavior we hope to see in our beloved heroine. To be fair, I didn't have to get that secret, I just wanted all the special features (story boards, art galleries, and concept art from Tomb Raider: The Next Generation) obtained from their acquisition.

Guns are not, the puzzles play the most important role in Chronicles. It'll take a lot of exploring to find everything, and quite often Lara will have to die to figure out what to do next. There's a metaphor in there somewhere, but I'm too tired to find it.

But if any of this left me feeling a little down on the game, my spirits were raised when I first booted it up in OS X. Under Apple's new OS, Tomb Raider: Chronicles played flawlessly. In fact, it played better there than in OS 9, where the audio of the cinematic cut scenes came through garbled and distorted on my Harman/Kardon USB speakers. I'm certainly used to this behavior in games, but I didn't have this problem in OS X. A couple times, I rebooted in OS X and replayed certain areas just to get better audio in the following movie.

And then there's the highly demanded level editor. Although Aspyr doesn't support it, they did provide the Tomb Raider Level Editor for fans to create their own adventures for Lara. This both frightens and intrigues me. I haven't yet downloaded any homemade levels, but I will. I'm sure a few will be really good and will greatly prolong the life of an otherwise short game. Many, however...well, there was a fan-made level for Dark Forces where, after a rambunctious party, Princess Leia allowed "compromising photos" of herself to be taken. Your mission was to retrieve these photos before they fell into the hands of the Empire, thereby causing irreparable embarrassment to the Rebellion.

Gamers are scary, scary people.

To learn more about the Level Editor and to find links to numerous sites that host levels, be sure to visit Kerrie H. Reay's MacRaider site. It also has your walkthroughs which, I'm embarrassed to say, proved quite handy to me this time around. She also documents a few saved game bugs that crept into the Mac version, thereby saving hours of frustration.

If you're a Tomb Raider fan who was somewhat let down by the movie, Tomb Raider: Chronicles will restore your faith in the franchise. If you're new to Lara Croft's adventures, this is not the place to start...it's the place to finish. Pick up the Tomb Raider Trilogy when it's released, and if you're into it, give The Last Revelation a go to see just what left Lara buried under Egyptian sand in the first place. Only then can you truly appreciate the moment when Werner Von Croy finds...

Oh, sorry. I have to go. Now that I've finished Chronicles and once again retrieved my soul, I have to go find my wife's. Perhaps setting her up with Tomb Raider III wasn't such a good idea after all.

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