Tomb Raider The Last Revelation

Tomb Raider The Last Revelation
Puzzle Platform - Dreamcast
Battery Backup - 10 saves
1 player

The Last Revelation is the fourth game of the series. Tomb Raider II sort of took the title in a different direction, by having more human enemies to shoot and more ordinary settings to interact with. I didn't play much of II, but I distinctly recall a stage set in Venice, where you jumped on balconies and rooftops. The Last Revelation mostly goes back to its roots, with the bulk of the time spent in exotic locales. It feels very ambitious, with interconnecting stages that offer a long adventure for explorers. It's just too bad that when I think of this game, I can't help but utter obscenities. The Last Revelation is the only game reviewed here I have not completed.

Let's get this out of the way. The Last Revelation has some programming glitches that completely ruin the game. I know I said this with my last review of Bionic Commando Elite Forces, but this is much worse. Once you trigger the bug, your game is stuck forever. Worse yet, they are situated towards the end of the game, so if you trigger one of the bugs, and are left without a fresh save, you have only two options: 1) Quit the game, and start over from the beginning. 2) Quit the game, curse its existence, and expose its shoddy quality to any would-be player. Guess which category I'm in? After clocking in about 20 hours, I encountered a puzzle which requires pushing three stone blocks in specific sequences to open up several gates. But if you push the blocks in the wrong order, you almost always trigger a bug that prevents you from resetting the blocks, so you're unable to ever push them again. In fact, even if you push the blocks in the correct sequence, the bug could still occur, thus locking you out of some passageways that are required to finish the stage. I've read that it's been patched for the PC versions, but Playstation and Dreamcast owners are completely out of luck. The only workaround is having multiple save files, and hope that at least one of them doesn't have the bug triggered. Even then, you won't always know immediately that you've triggered the bug. Since I didn't have any uncorrupted saves, I was completely screwed and consequently, gave up playing it.

I did, however, go through most of the game, so I can discuss those items. A friend of mine mentioned that Tomb Raider is best in tombs. Given that developer CORE went further and further away from tomb exploration with TRII and TRIII, it's not as obvious as you might think. The Last Revelation thrusts you into an ancient tomb right from the get-go, and it's better for it. The sense of discovery and wonder from the first game is very much intact. The added bonus is that The Last Revelation ends up being a lot more creepy. Whereas the first TR had booby traps to guard treasures, The Last Revelation adds ancient curses to the mix. The atmosphere is much darker as a result. But, as a nod to the previous games, The Last Revelation still tries its hand at being an action game. There ends up being a fair amount of shooting. In addition to the animals, there are enemy ninjas, soldiers, and automated gun turrets to keep Lara busy.

At its center, The Last Revelation offers much of what the series has always offered. It's focused primarily on discovery and puzzle-solving. The puzzles in this outing generally require more logic than the original. That's one aspect I enjoyed. Many times, your next step may not be obvious, but if you took a moment to observe your surroundings, the answer will become clear. Tomb Raider excels at building subtle clues to the solutions into the environment. For the most part, you just have to pay attention. Many of the stages are connected to one another. This gives the game a less linear feel, as sometimes you'll need to backtrack through a previous stage to access your next destination. The upside is that you can utilize the level boundaries to regain all your health - each time you enter a stage, you start with a full bar. But one thing that is lost from previous games, are the summaries of stage results, such as number of secrets found, how long it took you to complete the stage, etc. Instead, you only have a cumulative count of those statistics. So if you discovered only 40 of the 70 game's secrets, you have no indication of which stages you're missing secrets in.

Other than the horrible QA, there are plenty of other issues that make The Last Revelation a drag to play. The biggest problem of all is that the game is way too dark. Unlike the previous games which had a brightness adjustment in the options menu, it has been removed here. Sure I could adjust my TV brightness for one stupid game. Or maybe the game shouldn't have been designed this way in the first place. The game is so dark, that half of the time all you see is a Lara in pitch darkness. To compensate, Lara can light flares, which emit a small radius of light for 20 seconds. But since they're of such limited quantity, you can't really use them every 20 seconds. Another option is to fire your pistols. When you fire your pistols, it lights up the immediate area around Lara for half a second. Since you have unlimited ammo, it works as a cheap-man's light source. But the area of light is much smaller than the flares, so it's easy to miss item pick-ups and clues to your next location. So what's the other workaround? You have binoculars in your inventory. Luckily, the binoculars have an illuminated view when using them. This is probably the preferred method, because you can always reuse your binoculars. But what this means is that every time you enter an unfamiliar area, you will bring up the Options menu, select Inventory, select the binoculars, then wave the camera around while holding the light button to see what's around you. Then you unequip the binoculars, face a different direction, call up the options menu, select inventory, select binoculars and do it again so you can finally get a good look at what is around you. Remember, observation is -everything- in this game. Making everything ridiculously dark was obviously an intentional decision by the developers. But it's obviously also such a horrible decision, that it makes playing the game a chore. Some other sore spots include rope swinging and motorcycle levels. There are a few segments in the game where you need to swing on one rope, jump off it, and grab onto another rope during your descent. If you're misaligned even a little bit, you will plummet to your death. Turns out... at least one rope jump segment will kill you if you line your trajectory up correctly. You have to be off to the side by a centimeter in order to correctly grab the next rope. What on earth was Core thinking? Core also thought it'd be fun to include a motorcycle to ride. So there are a series of stages in the second half of the game where you are forced to ride a bike around. It's not enough that the motorcycle handles like a pig, and has the turning radius of a plane. No, sirree. The developers thought it would be fun to have Lara pilot a motorcycle IN PITCH DARKNESS. To be fair, the bike has a headlight, and that automatically makes it a little better than the pathetic options Lara has on foot. But it exemplifies exactly what's wrong with the game.

Tomb Raider The Last Revelation tries so hard to be the epic Tomb Raider. It features huge levels that interconnect, unique puzzles to solve, a creepy atmosphere and a dramatic story. The glitch that ultimately ruined the game for me is one thing. But the poor judgment in making the game as dark as possible was already grounds for dismissing this game entirely. I tried to like The Last Revelation. Occasional glimpses of the original Tomb Raider shown through. But ultimately, every positive attribute was obscured by darkness.