Game info

• Title Tomb Raider: Chronicles
• Developer [Core Design Aspyr]
• Publisher [Eidos Interactive Aspyr]
• Year 2000
• Platform Playstation 5
• Genre Action

Four newly discovered and previously untold adventures are revealed when the missing Lara Croft's closest friends gather in her honour. As they reminisce about her past exploits, they learn new details about her life as well as the lives of characters from her past adventures. Lara journeys from the ruins of Rome, to the bowels of a German U-boat, to the rooftops of a hi-tech city in a search for four ancient artefacts. The game uses the same graphics engine used in Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation, but introduces new moves: tightrope walking, parallel bar swinging, and a hand-to-hand stealth attack. An enhanced inventory system allows for greater combinations of a variety of weapons and items.

Player Select

Something slightly odd has happened with the two Tomb Raider remastered bundles, in that I am deliberately playing through all the games in the second bundle (Last Revelation, Chronicles, Angel of Darkness), whilst the first one still remains mostly unplayed and unreviewed. I’ll get back to it, of course, but it’s quite unlike me not to have to start at the beginning of something. Anyway, having left Lara buried in a tomb in Egypt, I was interested to see what this game had in store, as it’s format is quite different to any other in the Tomb Raider canon.

It’s in the Game

As a concept, I quite like the idea of a group of friends getting together and toasting to Lara’s life, reminscing on her greatest adventures, and thus we get to have a bit of a greatest hits. In reality, this game does not deliver at all.

The problem with having four separate levels is that you never have time to build up stocks - if you play better earlier in the game, it all resets at some point and you get no reward for it later. The other problem is there’s no time for the stakes to get particularly high, the stories are necessarily short and so you don’t get fully invested.

I quite enjoyed the Rome adventure but felt like there could have been so much more to do, things just end and you move on. The other three levels are less interesting, even though one of them is on a submarine! The third with baby Lara scampering around Ireland and getting into trouble just felt silly, and the final level was as if the developers wanted to cash in on Mission Impossible, with not a tomb in sight.

The gameplay was either too easy or too dull, and even though I wasn’t enjoying it, it all felt too short - within each of the foiur stories and then as a game over all. Just disappointed in the whole thing. It’s such a shame because I think there’s a kernal of something good here, but it just isn’t done very well.

Thoughts

On the one hand, I’m glad to have played this because I’m a Tomb Raider fan and it’s right that I should try and play all the games. But I really wouldn’t recommend it to anyone else, there’s not much to talk up and it’s best to play one of the others instead.

End of level boss - Apr 25

The game was so short that it was worth finishing it before bothering to review it, so tick this one off the list and we move on to Angel of Darkness.

Rating: 1 / 5