Tomb Raider: Chronicles is the penultimate nail in the coffin of a tired, rehash-driven annual franchise that was forced upon Core Design over and over by their demonic overlords at Eidos. Even the developers didn't want to make it, and it shows. It is a dull, drab affair with disjointed storylines that were little more than an excuse to be sponsored by Timex Watches. A soulless cash grab cobbled together from B-sides, like a has-been rock band trying to squeeze a few more dollars out of their brand before being relegated to the county-fair circuit forevermore.

... is what I would say if I was a fucking SHEEP who simply parrots what he heard a talking head on YouTube say without having played the game. This game is actually pretty good!

Look, a lot of the above is true. Core Design were tired of making Tomb Raider, and the biggest victims of their revenge were the fans. After finishing the third and fourth instalments, which were all but designed to frustrate and sell strategy guides, I was so disheartened that I put my marathon of the series on hold for two months. Every time my cursor hovered over the Play button for Chronicles, I felt sick to my stomach and would find any excuse not to play it. I didn't want any more punishment.

But eventually I manned up, and I'm glad I did. Chronicles is an enjoyable game. Not as good as the first two, not even close. But a suitable last hurrah for this era of Tomb Raider, one of the many series that launched the PlayStation brand into the stratosphere.

In this game, Lara Croft (or as she's known in Indonesia, Lara ibn Croft) has died - buried alive in Set's tomb, as you remember from The Last Revelation. A statue of her is erected once they find granite strong enough for her thighs, everybody boo-hoos at the funeral, and goes home. When my grandfather died, we kids all huddled together to play Bounce on his Nokia phone while the adults grieved. Similarly, Lara's closest friends huddle together to pour themselves shots of her finest whiskey and reminisce about her finest moments while her rival/mentor Von Croy actually tries to dig her corpse out of her sandy mausoleum.

This forms the frame story for four separate adventures that were designed to mock as many accents as possible. Whether you are French, Texan, Russian, Irish, Russian again, German, or African-American, the voice acting in Tomb Raider: Chronicles will bring you together in saying, "What the fuck is this racist shit?" The game is a lot more cutscene- and dialogue-heavy than any entry up till that point, and the CGI FMVs were done by the same people who did them for Final Fantasy IX, so they're pretty neat.

Something else the game is: a lot more balanced and... like a normal game. There are only a couple of the bullshit traps and deaths that TR3 and the second half of TR4 were inundated with, and the puzzles can actually be solved without opening a guide. Stealth elements play a major role in the final levels, and while it's still no Metal Gear Solid, the game does them far better than in TR3. Platforming is finally based on skill again instead of save-scumming and guesswork, and the areas you need to go are mostly telegraphed properly, or close enough to discover without logging onto Stella's Tomb Raider Site.

You can tell the developers were tired at points, such as piles of coal being square because cutting some polygons is too hard, or ventilation ducts being diagonal because they couldn't be arsed to make a new texture along the stairways. There are reportedly some game-breaking bugs in the final level, though I encountered none myself - I'm unaware if this was because I completed it in one go, or because the Steam version has been patched.

Yet by and large, Chronicles plays well, and is far less dreary than I'd been led to believe. It seems that the burnout that forced Core Design to handle this game with soft hands was for the greater good in the end. Lacking the time and ambition to torture players, they went back to formula and made something decent. Tomb Raider: Chronicles is neither excellent nor essential. But for someone looking for the Tomb Raider experience in 2024, this is a far more accessible game than its two predecessors.

This was the last title that was developed by Core Design's veteran team. Elsewhere, a new team was assembling Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness at the same time. It seems no one at Eidos had ever read about the dangers of overexposure - Chronicles' unfortunate reputation, in hindsight of having played it, seems largely due to just how hard Lara was being milked at the time. There were Chronicles and Angel of Darkness being developed concurrently, there were the Tomb Raider films starring Angelina Jolie, and there was the U2 tour that Lara Croft was the mascot for. If Bono picks you to represent him you know you're sunk deep in the mire of commercialism.

This entry, however, is fun - so much so that it's rejuvenated me to give Angel of Darkness a fair shake. Though I would have anyway. I love Lara Croft so much I wish I had schizophrenia so she could talk to me through the screen. Though not at 3 am, that would be too scary.