It's 2015. A new year, a new start, a chance to cast off the shackles of the previous year and embrace new possibilities and opportunities. It's an invitation to try and make changes in our lives for the better, that we might make this new year better than the last one.

It's apparently also the perfect time to play bad video games.

I'm not sure what possessed me to kick off the New Year by playing through Tomb Raider: Chronicles. It's almost universally regarded as the worst of Lara Croft's first five outings and my own personal least-favourite (with good reason, as I've come to learn first-hand over the last week or so). Admittedly, I'd never beaten it up to now, but the same is true of every other game currently sitting on my Pile of Shame - a backlog so large I've had to split it across two separate Giant Bomb lists, lest I lose the ability to effectively alter it. Why this game over the other one hundred and sixty-seven contenders? Other than "why not?", I cannot think of a single argument that makes sense.

I've covered my history with the Tomb Raider franchise several times in old blog entries, so I'll spare you another rebranding of the finer details here. Suffice it to say I grew up playing the CORE-developed games on the original PlayStation and have a pretty strong affinity for them as a result, even with the benefit of hindsight revealing that they're not as great as I once believed. There's something to be said for the way the games awaken latent muscle memory within my fingers, nailing every precarious jump as if I never stopped playing. It's why, fifteen years on from their release, I can comfortably return to old Tomb Raider games. I can even enjoy them (my time spent with The Last Revelation in 2011 is a testament to that).

I did not enjoy Tomb Raider: Chronicles.

It's hard to know where to start explaining why. Under any other circumstances, I would cite its length as a problem. Chronicles clocked in at seven hours for me. That's according to the in-game clock, mind, which doesn't factor in any of the time I spent dying due to electrified floors or poorly-judged leaps of faith over bottomless chasms. Include those frustrating additions and my time with the game probably gets closer to between ten and twelve hours. Speaking entirely from personal experience, that's pretty damn slight for a Tomb Raider game. Ordinarily I'd call the game out for its brevity, but if anything, Chronicles is mercifully short - its abridged running time serves as a welcome release for some of its more glaring issues.

Issues like severe tonal schizophrenia. Chronicles is made up of four distinct scenarios, each consisting of a handful of levels, and the game's tone shifts so wildly between these scenarios that the whole thing ends up feeling like a disjointed mess. Of these scenarios, the first and third have some merit. The first sees Lara gallivanting around Rome in search of the Philosopher's Stone. It's easily the most Tomb Raider-ish of the scenarios, with old villains making cameos and a healthy mix of combat, exploration and puzzle-solving making up the bulk of the action. The third puts the player in the shoes of a younger Lara, and it plays rather differently - because Lara doesn't have her trademark dual pistols, there's no combat to be had in this scenario, making parts of it play more like a survival horror game than a traditional Tomb Raider title. Thankfully, it complements this novel approach with the best environmental puzzles in the game, making it more of a success than a failure.

That leaves scenarios two and four. The second takes place on a Russiansubmarine, which severely limits the potential for puzzles, reducing most of the levels to finding keys to open locked doors in order to keep moving through the sub. This is frustrating, but it's the fourth and final scenario that takes the cake. It sees Lara infiltrating a New York skyscraper to steal an artefact, using a combination of stealth and high-tech gadgetry. Thinking about it, I can kind of see why the developers might have thought this would be a good idea. Chronicles came out in 2000, when Metal Gear Solid was the game to beat and everyone was after a slice of the stealth action pie. Never mind the fact it's completely out of the series' comfort zone. Never mind that stealth mechanics are almost completely unworkable in our game engine. Never mind that it's completely out of character for Lara to break into a corporate headquarters to steal treasure because of a personal vendetta. Nope, let's get as many goons in mech armour dual-wielding laser guns as we can in here, and we'll worry about the consequences later.

The consequences, as it turns out, aren't just detrimental to the narrative. They're also fundamentally game-breaking. I don't know if it's because the Tomb Raider game engine wasn't built to handle so much bastardisation of its usual coding, but for whatever reason, Chronicles' final level is glitched to fuck. I saved my game about ten minutes from the end, and died shortly thereafter. When I reloaded the game, it put me right back to the start of the level, and to add insult to injury, rendered Lara completely invisible. Thankfully I was playing on a PS3 with a dedicated internal memory card, and I had a back-up save that I could fall back on. Back in 2000, when memory card space was severely limited and a lot of games were starting to take up multiple blocks on a card, people didn't have the luxury of keeping several saves. This bug genuinely could have fucked up a player's entire progress through the game ten minutes from its end. Hell, it probably did. How the fuck does something like that get marked as 'known shippable'?

Even if I could overlook these problems, being the long-time fan of the series that I am, I'd find it difficult to get past the sheer laziness and lack of heart with which the whole package was put together. Things like the inventory screen being ripped straight out of the previous game, with nothing being done to tone down its 'Egyptian' feel, making it feel ridiculously out of place. Or the fact that the villain models in the first scenario seem to have been lifted directly from the first Tomb Raider game without being smartened up. It's even harder to believe this game was preceded by The Last Revelation, a game notable for its level of care and attention to detail. Quite how the development team at CORE could go from that to this in the space of a year is almost mystifying.

Tomb Raider: Chronicles is the unnecessary sequel to your favourite film. It is the last album by your favourite band before they cut ties with their old record label. It is the bastard child of contractual obligation and series annualization, a husk of its much-loved predecessors with no discernible heart or soul. To experience it is almost wholly joyless, because the rare flickers of greatness only serve to remind you of what might have been, amplifying the impact of the formulaic remainder in the process.

...but hey, at least it's better than Angel of Darkness, right?

Thanks for reading guys. I'll try to play something a bit better next (suggestions based on the aforementioned Pile of Shame are always welcome). A Happy New Year to y'all. I'll see you around.

Dan

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Currently playing - Pokémon Omega Ruby (3DS)

As a huge fan of Tomb Raider, I question your decision.

I liked your Last Revelation blog, though. That was a heck of a game, despite the huge ambition of its puzzles that made me never finish the game. Last time they even came close to that was the Mexico section in Underworld (which I actually managed to finish!)

I'd question your motives for playing this, but I am all about playing questionable entries in my favorite long-running game series. (Might and Magic IX, Devil May Cry 2, Resident Evil 6, etc etc. ) So I can't exactly cast any stones at the concept of self-inflicted drudgery.

Tomb Raider Chronicles sounds like the direct to video sequel that exists to satisfy a checklist and little else. Games like that are in some ways worse than ambitious failures like Angel of Darkness because they don't try.

It's like Eidos went whoops we killed off Lara last game, now how will we make money? Oh yeah, flashbacks.