1 review liked by danni
Edit: I did end up going back to finish this game. It definitely has it's moments, but ultimately is far, far too long for it's own good and has way too much needless backtracking.
At the time of writing, I have around 20 hours in this game which if the previous three games are anything to go by, I should be around 2/3 of the way through this game. While all the prior games had their fair mix of fantastic level designs, mixed with convoluted and honestly sometimes annoying puzzle design, Tomb Raider IV: The Last Revelation just goes too far with the puzzles. With that being said, I don't think this game is nearly as enjoyable as the original trilogy and think I'll be dropping it for now.
First off what I've read, this game runs in a new engine which if you go directly from 3 to 4, is noticeable. Sure, Lara still controls like a tank but the levels in this game have much more polygons and relies less on the grid-design of the past games. This works fantastic in making more believable and interesting level designs but does occasionally lead to Lara getting stuck in the ground/walls more often. There were also 2 game-breaking bugs I encountered in the Alexandria and Cairo levels where I needed to reload saves to continue. One involved water not filling an area I needed to swim in and ice wraiths not turning water I needed to walk on into ice. Both were fixed by loading an old save and doing things different, but I never encountered bugs like these in prior games.
Undoubtedly the biggest change in this game is the fact the levels are now inter-connected. There is no Croft Manor level in this game so that functionality is now replaced by a mandatory tutorial level. With the exception of this and possibly later levels (I didn't finish the game), each area can consist of anywhere from 3-7 different levels. At first this seems great as in the first area, levels are fairly linear so if you need to backtrack, it's not difficult to do. Tedious, yes, but do-able.
However, once you get to Alexandria and Cairo (the level I gave up on this game), the amount of backtracking becomes unbearable if you don't make sure to grab every key item before moving on, an impossible task if you're playing this for the first time, obviously. I found myself very often searching every nook and cranny in a level, only to decide that I must be missing an item and go somewhere else to look for it. This would take me hours of running in circles before I would cave-in and use a guide. It's when I used a guide, I would discover that I missed 3 key items in Level 1 and another in Level 2. So in missing 4 items, I would have to backtrack to each of these levels and perform a separate puzzle to obtain each of these items, just so I could progress in Level 3, which would give me an item I need to unlock Level 4 which can only be accessed in Level 2. See why this is confusing? The game's puzzles basically can be described as:
Find Item A, B in Level 1 -- > Unlock door in Level 2 -- > Retrieve key that goes to a door in level 3 -- > Get another key to unlock another level in Level 1
I felt like I was crippling myself by not following a guide the entire time playing this game and if I am constantly needing a hint as to where to go, the game just isn't fun. Maybe I'll pick this game back up in the future but for now, I'm going to move on to AoD as this game even soured me off of Chronicles for the time being.
At the time of writing, I have around 20 hours in this game which if the previous three games are anything to go by, I should be around 2/3 of the way through this game. While all the prior games had their fair mix of fantastic level designs, mixed with convoluted and honestly sometimes annoying puzzle design, Tomb Raider IV: The Last Revelation just goes too far with the puzzles. With that being said, I don't think this game is nearly as enjoyable as the original trilogy and think I'll be dropping it for now.
First off what I've read, this game runs in a new engine which if you go directly from 3 to 4, is noticeable. Sure, Lara still controls like a tank but the levels in this game have much more polygons and relies less on the grid-design of the past games. This works fantastic in making more believable and interesting level designs but does occasionally lead to Lara getting stuck in the ground/walls more often. There were also 2 game-breaking bugs I encountered in the Alexandria and Cairo levels where I needed to reload saves to continue. One involved water not filling an area I needed to swim in and ice wraiths not turning water I needed to walk on into ice. Both were fixed by loading an old save and doing things different, but I never encountered bugs like these in prior games.
Undoubtedly the biggest change in this game is the fact the levels are now inter-connected. There is no Croft Manor level in this game so that functionality is now replaced by a mandatory tutorial level. With the exception of this and possibly later levels (I didn't finish the game), each area can consist of anywhere from 3-7 different levels. At first this seems great as in the first area, levels are fairly linear so if you need to backtrack, it's not difficult to do. Tedious, yes, but do-able.
However, once you get to Alexandria and Cairo (the level I gave up on this game), the amount of backtracking becomes unbearable if you don't make sure to grab every key item before moving on, an impossible task if you're playing this for the first time, obviously. I found myself very often searching every nook and cranny in a level, only to decide that I must be missing an item and go somewhere else to look for it. This would take me hours of running in circles before I would cave-in and use a guide. It's when I used a guide, I would discover that I missed 3 key items in Level 1 and another in Level 2. So in missing 4 items, I would have to backtrack to each of these levels and perform a separate puzzle to obtain each of these items, just so I could progress in Level 3, which would give me an item I need to unlock Level 4 which can only be accessed in Level 2. See why this is confusing? The game's puzzles basically can be described as:
Find Item A, B in Level 1 -- > Unlock door in Level 2 -- > Retrieve key that goes to a door in level 3 -- > Get another key to unlock another level in Level 1
I felt like I was crippling myself by not following a guide the entire time playing this game and if I am constantly needing a hint as to where to go, the game just isn't fun. Maybe I'll pick this game back up in the future but for now, I'm going to move on to AoD as this game even soured me off of Chronicles for the time being.