Tomb Raider Chronicles

Release Date: November 24, 2000

"A suspense-laden stealth ’em up, a head-pounding puzzler and an all-action thriller"

Remember that bit in the first Tomb Raider where our freshfaced heroine slides down the side of a gigantic Sphinx and begins trotting across the cavern floor? The camera suddenly zoomed right back into the ceiling, leaving little Lara a tiny figure in the sand, completely dwarfed by her surroundings and simultaneously leaving gamers awestruck by the sheer scale of the game. This was obviously the start of something very special.

Five years later, the girl with the guns is a cultural phenomenon. She’s appeared on the cover of style mags (The Face) and featured in ads for fizzy drinks (Lucozade). Grown men even claim to have fallen in love with her (stand up barmy Niels Bemds of Holland, as featured in OPM63). Alongside the hedgehog and the fat plumber, she is one of the most recognisable characters in videogame history. But in the last game, Core Design - presumably sick of the sight of staring at her lithe limbs for the past five years appeared to kill her off. She was last seen buried under a bloody great big pile of pyramidal rubble, which rather begs the question, what are we doing with another game? Surely this is a blatant cash-in;

Core milking Lara's dusty corpse for every groat they can scrape. This, however, is not the case. Not by a long way Tomb Raider Chronicles is far from the hastily slapped together rush job we were expecting. Despite the dodgy premise, its actually incredibly well put together, concentrating on the gameplay elements that made the Tomb Raider series great.

TRC opens with Laras friends and family gathered in the pouring rain round a suitably extravagant statue of our intrepid archaeologist, mourning the apparent loss of one so young yet so very, very fit. Trusty butler Winston.

Gaelic man of the cloth Father Patrick, and french fancy Jean Yves return to Croft Mansions after the memorial service and. over a snifter of whiskey or two, begin to reminisce over the scrapes that Lara got into between the last four epic adventures. While it sounds like a shaky plot device for a game, it works very well. Chronicles is split into four separate and distinct mini-adventures linked only by Lara, and not by an epic quest for a collection of ancient artefacts. This has allowed Core to expand Laras world sideways, in as much as we get to find out a little bit more about her| life outside archaeology, and it also allows for a much greater depth of gameplay. TRC does feature a traditional Tomb Raider adventure - with Lara barrelling round Rome - but it also breaks up into a suspense-laden stealth 'em up. a head-pounding puzzler and an all-action thriller. Brilliant.

The first quarter of the game begins behind the opera house in Rome (remember, the one from TR2) with Lara on a hunt for the Philosopher’s Stone. Inept bad guys Larsen and Pierre are chasing her cute little derriere round a temple as she searches for the keys to unlock the way through to the next level. So far, so very Tomb Raider - except the puzzles are a little more accessible and the lovingly textured back alleys of this game make the Rome of TR2 look like the backstreets of Delhi. Which is good. But the crucial factor that tightens up the gameplay - and this applies to all four adventures in TRC - is the way the levels have been designed this time. Core is the first to acknowledge the marked difference between TR2 and 3, at the root of which are the ever-expanding levels. TR3 contained levels you could, and quite frequently did. get completely lost in.

Core went down that route because people were crying out for bigger adventures, but in most cases sprawling levels are disastrous because it makes game direction very difficult to control.

By returning to the (relatively) compact levels of the early games. TRC keeps you riveted to the adventure - solve puzzle, crack code, move on to the next one. all guns blazing.

It's in the second adventure that you get a sense of just how creative the level designers have been. Lara dons Arctic camouflage gear and infiltrates an abandoned German U-Boat, housing the mythical Spear Of Destiny that Hitler was supposedly trying to get his hands on in World War 2. The puzzles that lead to the sub may be classic Tomb Raider, but the penalties of failure reveal a sick twist.

The opening area is a cargo bay containing a guy who controls a huge crane that’s sweeping across the ceiling, picking up crates. The first time you walk in the room you'll wander about for a few seconds before hearing a whirring noise. Automatically you'll stop dead (whirring noises in Tomb Raider are bad), which is completely the wrong thing to do. The guy in the crane has spotted you and dropped his steel talons down on your pig-tailed bonce. Hello, instant death. Once inside the confines of the sub, the camera angles generate a nasty, claustrophobic atmosphere with Lara stalking round, dodging sparking electrical cables, never knowing quite what's around the next corner.

Reminiscent of any submarine movie, the level balances perfectly the though and action that’s at the heart of the Tomb Raider series.

By the third adventure, its time for Father Patrick to take up the story and we flash back to an inquisitive teenage Lara, stowed away with the good priest on a jaunt to Ireland to solve a mysterious haunting. Since Lara's so young, she has no weapons and must rely on brain power to get through the level. Its a nice idea, but of all the levels, this is the weakest. Setting the adventure at night doesn't help matters. In a level that revolves around making precision jumps and dodging little creatures (Core claims they are imps but they look suspiciously like a remodelling of the baboons in TR3) the absence of much light makes life trickier than it should be. Its also the only level where the in-game cut-scenes and camera views don't work as well as they could, again because of the darkness. You'll find Lara stuck in an old chapel, where the camera skips around the rafters following her. Unfortunately, the skeleton that’s chasing you with a sword is oblivious to your fumblings with the view. A shame because the idea of a purely puzzle-based Lara adventure could have worked very well.

Tomb Raider Chronicles - Opening/Intro Clip

Finally, we arrive at undoubtedly the best level in the game, and probably one of the best Tomb Raider levels ever. Lara does the Matrix by way of Mission Impossible with a hefty dose of Metal Gear thrown in. Alongside helping-hand Zip. her mission (should she choose to accept it) is to break into Von Croys head quarters and steal the artefact known as the Iris. Having blasted past a couple of plasma-wielding guards. Lara discovers the place is stacked up to the rafters with alarm systems. Time to dump the gunnery then. Fortunately she’s something of a part-time chemist and. after finding a couple of jars of chloroform and bits of cloth, sets about knocking out the laser-wielding guardsmen. Despite being a relatively small level, there’s a touch of genius in the way the gameplay guides the player through the building. Partly this works and this is the case across the whole game - through the clever use of in-game cut-scenes. Lara appears to be able to do a whole load of actions above and beyond the call of duty: sliding into bad guys, leaping out of the way of laser lunges. These are actually mini cut-scenes that blend so seamlessly into the action you still feel like you’re in control. And the lighting effect on that cat suit is something to behold...

The standard Croft improvements crop up in TRC, with a couple of new moves such as the superbly animated tightrope walk and the parallel bar swing, but Core has also managed to graft a scary edge on to the action. On numerous occasions during the game, set-pieces occur that you just never expect - the crane in the sub dock is one. as is the sudden explosion down the vents of Von Croys building. It adds a real level of suspense to the game and that impresses on you the fact that this may be Tomb Raider V but we haven’t seen it ail yet.

"Lara can do a load of actions beyond the call of duty: sliding into bad guys, leaping away from laser lunges"

Over the years, there’s no doubt the Tomb Raider games have fluctuated in quality. Partly that’s because the brilliant moments in previous instalments were spread too thinly over sprawling games. Chronicles is a hit because it ditches the rambling levels and concentrates and enhances all the elements that worked into one stunning final episode.

Anyway, back to this Croft-meets-the Grim Reaper issue. Surely they can’t really have killed her off. can they? Isn’t she supposed to be appearing on PS2? For the answer to that question, you’ll have to play the game. And you really do have to play this game.

PlayStationVerdict

■ GRAPHICS: The pinnacle of PlayStation texturing. Sigh

■ GAMEPLAY: Masterfully paced and much tighter than the last two adventures

■ LIFESPAN: The secrets make it worth playing a couple of times As usual..

■ OVERALL: Chronicles is the epitome of just how good an adventure can be. Next-gen Lara's reputed to be something different' As long as Core maintains these high standards, she'll be in good hands