thebestmark
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Despite aging pretty rough and having some pretty questionable gameplay design decisions, H2 Silent Assassin is still a pretty sweet and short stealth game. Enjoyable most of the time when it sticks to the compact, multi-choice, multi-path sandboxes, and really frustrating when slogging through cover barren landmasses with enemies that sniff you out no matter the disguise (looking at you Japan and Afghanistan). You can really see this is where Io-I is starting to find their footing with where they want to take this franchise. Despite its faults, the best parts of this game are guaranteed to have you coming back to see every outcome.
This review has been a long time coming. It's been coming since before the site you're reading this on was founded. It's been coming before some of you were even born.
To know about my relationship with Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation, you have to know something about me. I first started this game some 20 years ago, at a time when I couldn't even tie my own shoelaces. In those intervening years, many attempts to beat this game followed. Just off the top of my head, I can remember attempts in 2004, 2005, 2007, 2009, 2011, 2012, 2015 and even in 2017, a time period where I didn't play video games a lot. Yet I always came up short. After reaching the game's halfway point - which was hammered into me by rote - Tomb Raider 4 would always get the best of me. I would give up. I would quit.
In 2020, I decided that I was never going to finish this game, and I skimmed through its ending cutscenes so that I could claim that I had beaten it. But I hadn't beaten it. I was a hack, a fraud, a liar. I was practically a member of Congress.
When I started my marathon of the Tomb Raider series in January of this year, this was the game I was looking forward to most. This was my opportunity to make things right, to make the lie a truth, to beat TR4 for good - for once in my life, to get the best of this game, instead of the other way around. I proudly proclaimed to my friends that I was Captain Ahab and Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation was my white whale. Of course, nobody has actually read Moby Dick, or they'd have pointed out to me that the story ends with the whale dragging Ahab beneath the waves.
Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation was to be Lara Croft's 'final problem.' Like her detective compatriot Sherlock Holmes, the character was so popular that the creator had burned out, and decided to kill them off. This was to be her last adventure, and she was assigned an appropriately epic quest - saving the world from the scourge of Egyptian god and all-around villain Seth, whom she accidentally releases on a routine raid. Her final send-off was intended to be her biggest adventure yet: huge levels, new abilities and ever more impressive graphics were prepared to accompany her into the afterlife.
The first half of Tomb Raider 4 - up to the point I always gave up at - is the best and most definitive classic TR has ever been. With Lara's new abilities and the tightly focused levels, traversing tombs and temples has never been more fun. There's even a prologue episode with a younger Lara, setting up her rivalry with one-time mentor Werner Von Croy. There are breezy exploration segments, smartly designed puzzles, thrilling timed runs and even a few passable combat sections - something the series has always struggled with. Apart from the introduction, the whole game takes in Egypt, and as a young player, I learned a lot about its ancient mythology just from this game. The race between Lara and a Seth-possessed Von Croy over the world's fate promises a thrilling conclusion to our heroine's last huzzah.
Yet it breaks my heart to say this, but the cracks eventually do start to show. The first half's linearity allows its strong points to shine. Once you get to the point where the game has interconnected levels - almost a sort of open world, and start running into rooms that are dead ends, that's where you should swallow your pride and open a walkthrough, because now it's a lot less focused and you'll want to save your time. The second half's location of keys and gates, with nary a context clue as to what you should do next, almost turns it into a point-and-click adventure game. There are a couple of puzzles whose logic has not been figured out even today, 25 years later. There are even more platforming sections that are made just to fuck with the player. Brute force - or a guide - is the only way through. Somewhere during Tomb Raider 3's development, it seems, Core Design lost their mojo for designing skill-based platforming segments that would throw down the gauntlet and challenge players to make use of everything they'd learned - best illustrated in the endgame of Tomb Raider II. Instead, they opted just to create trial-and-error sections with an instant death on every error.
The most glaring flaw, however is that this game clearly ran out of resources in its second half. Despite the apocalyptic events taking place in the story, the environments hardly convey them. A few half-hearted attempts at showing the brewing storm are made, yet the story tells me the clouds have already burst. The final boss is anticlimactic and subdued, and the final cutscene is too rushed to carry any poignancy. It feels more like a cheap cliffhanger than the 21-gun-salute, fireworks-forming-a-union-jack, not-a-dry-eye-in-the-house send-off Lara deserves. Of course we are aware that Eidos bosses found out that Core Design were planning to kill Lara off and screamed at them about it, but all oral histories say it was too late to alter the ending, so why wasn't it made better to begin with?
There isn't even a proper credits screen - after Lara is buried alive, her rival Von Croy (now suddenly back to his usual self) having failed to save her, we are kicked back to the title screen with a staff roll. No stats screen, no 'The End,' and not even a new music track to signal the end of an era - all we get is the same 'danger music' we heard throughout the game's boss encounters (except the final showdown, which lacks gravitas in part because of how awkwardly silent it is). This has to be the worst possible choice for what's supposed to be a downer ending.
This ludonarrative dissonance takes away from the latter half of the game, and I am utterly confident that if The Last Revelation was remade today with its second half done right, it could still be the best Tomb Raider game.
I've read many reviews of TR4 over the years saying that Core Design had gotten lazy with the series, and were pumping games out annually like the new Madden or Call of Duty. I completely disagree. While Tomb Raider 4's latter half does show the hallmarks of money running out during development, of an exhausted development team, and of time constraints, I can't say the developers were lazy with it. The gameplay is the best that classic Tomb Raider has ever been - just compare how many more fan mods were built in the TR4 engine than in any other classic TR. It also looks incredible for its time, and the FMVs are among the best of the era. It's just a pity that in the end, Core Design lacked the resources to make this the farewell it should have been. Not when they had Eidos breathing down their necks.
Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation will always be my favourite classic TR, the one I have the fondest childhood memories of, the one dearest to my heart, but objectively it's not the best one. That title still goes to the original. It was also the last 'good' Tomb Raider game for several years: the next entry, Chronicles, was a collection of B-sides that was hastily cobbled together like the yearly Madden, and Angel of Darkness is remembered as a promising yet half-finished mess. That was the end of Core Design's control over Tomb Raider, and the series was handed over to Crystal Dynamics.
But hey, that gave us the Legend-Anniversary-Underworld trilogy. Sometimes when God closes a door, he does open a window.
God bless Stella and her walkthrough site. Where would we be without that woman?
To know about my relationship with Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation, you have to know something about me. I first started this game some 20 years ago, at a time when I couldn't even tie my own shoelaces. In those intervening years, many attempts to beat this game followed. Just off the top of my head, I can remember attempts in 2004, 2005, 2007, 2009, 2011, 2012, 2015 and even in 2017, a time period where I didn't play video games a lot. Yet I always came up short. After reaching the game's halfway point - which was hammered into me by rote - Tomb Raider 4 would always get the best of me. I would give up. I would quit.
In 2020, I decided that I was never going to finish this game, and I skimmed through its ending cutscenes so that I could claim that I had beaten it. But I hadn't beaten it. I was a hack, a fraud, a liar. I was practically a member of Congress.
When I started my marathon of the Tomb Raider series in January of this year, this was the game I was looking forward to most. This was my opportunity to make things right, to make the lie a truth, to beat TR4 for good - for once in my life, to get the best of this game, instead of the other way around. I proudly proclaimed to my friends that I was Captain Ahab and Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation was my white whale. Of course, nobody has actually read Moby Dick, or they'd have pointed out to me that the story ends with the whale dragging Ahab beneath the waves.
Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation was to be Lara Croft's 'final problem.' Like her detective compatriot Sherlock Holmes, the character was so popular that the creator had burned out, and decided to kill them off. This was to be her last adventure, and she was assigned an appropriately epic quest - saving the world from the scourge of Egyptian god and all-around villain Seth, whom she accidentally releases on a routine raid. Her final send-off was intended to be her biggest adventure yet: huge levels, new abilities and ever more impressive graphics were prepared to accompany her into the afterlife.
The first half of Tomb Raider 4 - up to the point I always gave up at - is the best and most definitive classic TR has ever been. With Lara's new abilities and the tightly focused levels, traversing tombs and temples has never been more fun. There's even a prologue episode with a younger Lara, setting up her rivalry with one-time mentor Werner Von Croy. There are breezy exploration segments, smartly designed puzzles, thrilling timed runs and even a few passable combat sections - something the series has always struggled with. Apart from the introduction, the whole game takes in Egypt, and as a young player, I learned a lot about its ancient mythology just from this game. The race between Lara and a Seth-possessed Von Croy over the world's fate promises a thrilling conclusion to our heroine's last huzzah.
Yet it breaks my heart to say this, but the cracks eventually do start to show. The first half's linearity allows its strong points to shine. Once you get to the point where the game has interconnected levels - almost a sort of open world, and start running into rooms that are dead ends, that's where you should swallow your pride and open a walkthrough, because now it's a lot less focused and you'll want to save your time. The second half's location of keys and gates, with nary a context clue as to what you should do next, almost turns it into a point-and-click adventure game. There are a couple of puzzles whose logic has not been figured out even today, 25 years later. There are even more platforming sections that are made just to fuck with the player. Brute force - or a guide - is the only way through. Somewhere during Tomb Raider 3's development, it seems, Core Design lost their mojo for designing skill-based platforming segments that would throw down the gauntlet and challenge players to make use of everything they'd learned - best illustrated in the endgame of Tomb Raider II. Instead, they opted just to create trial-and-error sections with an instant death on every error.
The most glaring flaw, however is that this game clearly ran out of resources in its second half. Despite the apocalyptic events taking place in the story, the environments hardly convey them. A few half-hearted attempts at showing the brewing storm are made, yet the story tells me the clouds have already burst. The final boss is anticlimactic and subdued, and the final cutscene is too rushed to carry any poignancy. It feels more like a cheap cliffhanger than the 21-gun-salute, fireworks-forming-a-union-jack, not-a-dry-eye-in-the-house send-off Lara deserves. Of course we are aware that Eidos bosses found out that Core Design were planning to kill Lara off and screamed at them about it, but all oral histories say it was too late to alter the ending, so why wasn't it made better to begin with?
There isn't even a proper credits screen - after Lara is buried alive, her rival Von Croy (now suddenly back to his usual self) having failed to save her, we are kicked back to the title screen with a staff roll. No stats screen, no 'The End,' and not even a new music track to signal the end of an era - all we get is the same 'danger music' we heard throughout the game's boss encounters (except the final showdown, which lacks gravitas in part because of how awkwardly silent it is). This has to be the worst possible choice for what's supposed to be a downer ending.
This ludonarrative dissonance takes away from the latter half of the game, and I am utterly confident that if The Last Revelation was remade today with its second half done right, it could still be the best Tomb Raider game.
I've read many reviews of TR4 over the years saying that Core Design had gotten lazy with the series, and were pumping games out annually like the new Madden or Call of Duty. I completely disagree. While Tomb Raider 4's latter half does show the hallmarks of money running out during development, of an exhausted development team, and of time constraints, I can't say the developers were lazy with it. The gameplay is the best that classic Tomb Raider has ever been - just compare how many more fan mods were built in the TR4 engine than in any other classic TR. It also looks incredible for its time, and the FMVs are among the best of the era. It's just a pity that in the end, Core Design lacked the resources to make this the farewell it should have been. Not when they had Eidos breathing down their necks.
Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation will always be my favourite classic TR, the one I have the fondest childhood memories of, the one dearest to my heart, but objectively it's not the best one. That title still goes to the original. It was also the last 'good' Tomb Raider game for several years: the next entry, Chronicles, was a collection of B-sides that was hastily cobbled together like the yearly Madden, and Angel of Darkness is remembered as a promising yet half-finished mess. That was the end of Core Design's control over Tomb Raider, and the series was handed over to Crystal Dynamics.
But hey, that gave us the Legend-Anniversary-Underworld trilogy. Sometimes when God closes a door, he does open a window.
God bless Stella and her walkthrough site. Where would we be without that woman?
MultiVersus
2024
Am I playing a video game or visiting the fucking foreign exchange? Before the tutorial is even done, MultiVersus starts throwing its different currencies at you - the gems, the battle points, the diddly-doodlies, and then fucks right off, not even bothering to teach you the controls properly. Mobile gaming and its consequences have been a fucking disaster for the human race. MultiVersus is ostensibly a Smash clone making use of WB's many phagocytosed IPs, but in reality it's a front to sell you imaginary shit you don't need as hard as possible.
This game is so utterly banal, so sterile, so bereft of personality, so devoid of character, that it sparks no joy at all. The monkey's paw curled, and I realized a huge crossover between all these characters was better left as a pipe dream. Any smidgen of a stimulus has been carefully scrubbed out, with the art style sitting cozily between corporate training video and GrubHub ad, while the music never dares to edge near the foreground. It took me a while to realize that they actually were using musical motifs appropriate to the stages and characters, just that the soundtrack was arranged to be as same-y and unexciting as possible lest the customer switch out of 'buy' mode.
As for the gameplay... it's functional. There really isn't a lot to do, and the game feels very slow, and you spend more time looking at rewards screens screaming 'CLAIM CLAIM CLAIM CLAIM' than you do actually playing. Almost none of the characters are unlocked by default, to force you to either grind for or buy them - it actually kind of shows how diluted Superman's brand has become that he's unlocked by default in a game this greedy. Guess we should accept Batman is the DC mascot now?
This is one of the most cynicism-inducing experiences I've ever had with a video game, and the second-fastest I've abandoned one. It's joever. The obvious attempts to fry your dopamine receptors don't even work anymore... Well, before I quit I did play against two people who had bought custom skins yet barely seemed to know which button did what (and I am by no means good at Smash), so maybe it does work on some folks.
This game is so utterly banal, so sterile, so bereft of personality, so devoid of character, that it sparks no joy at all. The monkey's paw curled, and I realized a huge crossover between all these characters was better left as a pipe dream. Any smidgen of a stimulus has been carefully scrubbed out, with the art style sitting cozily between corporate training video and GrubHub ad, while the music never dares to edge near the foreground. It took me a while to realize that they actually were using musical motifs appropriate to the stages and characters, just that the soundtrack was arranged to be as same-y and unexciting as possible lest the customer switch out of 'buy' mode.
As for the gameplay... it's functional. There really isn't a lot to do, and the game feels very slow, and you spend more time looking at rewards screens screaming 'CLAIM CLAIM CLAIM CLAIM' than you do actually playing. Almost none of the characters are unlocked by default, to force you to either grind for or buy them - it actually kind of shows how diluted Superman's brand has become that he's unlocked by default in a game this greedy. Guess we should accept Batman is the DC mascot now?
This is one of the most cynicism-inducing experiences I've ever had with a video game, and the second-fastest I've abandoned one. It's joever. The obvious attempts to fry your dopamine receptors don't even work anymore... Well, before I quit I did play against two people who had bought custom skins yet barely seemed to know which button did what (and I am by no means good at Smash), so maybe it does work on some folks.
Tomb Raider
1996
One of my earliest memories is being a toddler and thus too stupid to know how to double-click an .exe file. "Auntie's game," I would tell my elder sisters. "I want to play Auntie's game." I don't know why I called Lara Croft my auntie, but I did. Today we'll be reviewing Auntie's game, kids.
In fact, a lot of my childhood memories revolve around 'the real Lara Croft,' as I have to call her now to differentiate her from Square Enix's stock protagonist. At the time, Lara was a celebrity - an actual celebrity - on a level I don't think I've seen a video game character be since. Being played by the gorgeous Angelina Jolie in two feature films sure helped, but even before that, there was something about Lara's design and attitude that imbued this primitive pack of polygons with a charismatic charm. The actual plot of Tomb Raider may be somewhat thin on the ground, but it was enough to establish Lara as a badass heroine, while the game's blocky but practical, rough-hewn yet well-researched environments did the rest.
Another childhood memory I have is telling my sister, "We have half an hour before school. We can both play Tomb Raider for 15 minutes each." I was a very kind child, you see. At the time, actually beating a video game was a distant thought for me - as achievable as climbing a mountain. It's only now, 20 years later, that I've finally finished this game by myself - no walkthroughs. I feel like mentioning that because Tomb Raider is actually a pretty tough game. If you clear a risky jump, you better save. If you come to a place with branching pathways, you'd better save. If you walk a few steps without dying, you'd better make two separate save files to account for two separate universes where you fuck up by a centimetre and fall to your death. By the time I finished this game, I'd saved exactly 380 times, but by golly I finally did it. Pity the people who played through this on the PS1 version, which doesn't let you save anywhere.
Yet even if my mentality about video games changed, the principles of Tomb Raider didn't. Both when I was 4, and now when I'm 25, it was all about the joy of exploration. Tomb Raider provides this joy in spades. The platforming, the puzzle-solving and the slow yet definite resolution of a level that at first looked impossibly complex - Tomb Raider was an early champion of these elements in a 3D space. There is combat, of course, but it's merely serviceable because Lara needed something for her iconic dual pistols to shoot at.
I don't know when humanity's collective IQ dropped to the point that tank controls became too big an ask for players to grasp, because they always felt intuitive to me. That isn't to say Tomb Raider isn't unforgiving as fuck, because it is. It requires precision platforming, lateral thinking and a good deal of patience. The game is mostly fair - with only a few bullshit moments reserved for the endgame when you're already attuned to its deceptions - but it plays by its own rules, which are hard and fast.
However, I'm only saying all of this now because I've already had my love rekindled. Despite my childhood memories, there were some moments early on where I said, "Fuck this game," because Tomb Raider has aged. Its design is archaic, and its graphics are nigh prehistoric. Even with some fanmade patches that modernize the game as best as they can, there's no hiding the fact that this is very much a 1996 game.
I entreat you to give this game a fair shake in spite of this. I said the game has aged, not that it's aged badly. With enough patience - juuuust enough to let the Stockholm syndrome set in - you too can discover the joy of Tomb Raider, of its hypnotic cycle of exploring levels with sparse musical cues and only the sepulchral ambience, the thumping of footsteps and the occasional ding of a secret discovered to keep you company. And every now and then, the sound of bones breaking as Lara falls to her death for the dozenth fucking time.
Before the Tomb Raider I-III Remaster trilogy was announced, I had long given Lara up for forgotten - that the only people who would even remember the PS1 Tomb Raider games would be the ones who grew up with them, because who has the time or patience anymore? But look past its flaws, I assure you. This was a revolutionary game then, and it's still a great game now. Tomb Raider in 2024 takes the act of exploring something ancient to find a hidden treasure to a very meta level.
In fact, a lot of my childhood memories revolve around 'the real Lara Croft,' as I have to call her now to differentiate her from Square Enix's stock protagonist. At the time, Lara was a celebrity - an actual celebrity - on a level I don't think I've seen a video game character be since. Being played by the gorgeous Angelina Jolie in two feature films sure helped, but even before that, there was something about Lara's design and attitude that imbued this primitive pack of polygons with a charismatic charm. The actual plot of Tomb Raider may be somewhat thin on the ground, but it was enough to establish Lara as a badass heroine, while the game's blocky but practical, rough-hewn yet well-researched environments did the rest.
Another childhood memory I have is telling my sister, "We have half an hour before school. We can both play Tomb Raider for 15 minutes each." I was a very kind child, you see. At the time, actually beating a video game was a distant thought for me - as achievable as climbing a mountain. It's only now, 20 years later, that I've finally finished this game by myself - no walkthroughs. I feel like mentioning that because Tomb Raider is actually a pretty tough game. If you clear a risky jump, you better save. If you come to a place with branching pathways, you'd better save. If you walk a few steps without dying, you'd better make two separate save files to account for two separate universes where you fuck up by a centimetre and fall to your death. By the time I finished this game, I'd saved exactly 380 times, but by golly I finally did it. Pity the people who played through this on the PS1 version, which doesn't let you save anywhere.
Yet even if my mentality about video games changed, the principles of Tomb Raider didn't. Both when I was 4, and now when I'm 25, it was all about the joy of exploration. Tomb Raider provides this joy in spades. The platforming, the puzzle-solving and the slow yet definite resolution of a level that at first looked impossibly complex - Tomb Raider was an early champion of these elements in a 3D space. There is combat, of course, but it's merely serviceable because Lara needed something for her iconic dual pistols to shoot at.
I don't know when humanity's collective IQ dropped to the point that tank controls became too big an ask for players to grasp, because they always felt intuitive to me. That isn't to say Tomb Raider isn't unforgiving as fuck, because it is. It requires precision platforming, lateral thinking and a good deal of patience. The game is mostly fair - with only a few bullshit moments reserved for the endgame when you're already attuned to its deceptions - but it plays by its own rules, which are hard and fast.
However, I'm only saying all of this now because I've already had my love rekindled. Despite my childhood memories, there were some moments early on where I said, "Fuck this game," because Tomb Raider has aged. Its design is archaic, and its graphics are nigh prehistoric. Even with some fanmade patches that modernize the game as best as they can, there's no hiding the fact that this is very much a 1996 game.
I entreat you to give this game a fair shake in spite of this. I said the game has aged, not that it's aged badly. With enough patience - juuuust enough to let the Stockholm syndrome set in - you too can discover the joy of Tomb Raider, of its hypnotic cycle of exploring levels with sparse musical cues and only the sepulchral ambience, the thumping of footsteps and the occasional ding of a secret discovered to keep you company. And every now and then, the sound of bones breaking as Lara falls to her death for the dozenth fucking time.
Before the Tomb Raider I-III Remaster trilogy was announced, I had long given Lara up for forgotten - that the only people who would even remember the PS1 Tomb Raider games would be the ones who grew up with them, because who has the time or patience anymore? But look past its flaws, I assure you. This was a revolutionary game then, and it's still a great game now. Tomb Raider in 2024 takes the act of exploring something ancient to find a hidden treasure to a very meta level.
Tomb Raider: Gold
1998
For my review of the main game, please see here. For Tomb Raider: Gold, I'm reviewing just the expansion pack that came with it in the form of four new levels.
You know when you see someone who's really good at something, and it inspires you to 'git gud' yourself? That's how I felt when watching playthroughs of custom Tomb Raider levels - some on par with the official games - that fans had created using Tomb Raider Level Editor. These guys are crazy, I tell you. They'd created platforming sections that I'd never conceptualized solving before. In fact, that may well be what inspired me to go back and beat the first Tomb Raider game for good.
So when I found out about this expansion pack, with four levels designed for 'expert raiders,' I felt that I was honour-bound to beat them too. I wanna be called an expert raider, even more than I wanna be called mommy's soft submissive boy.
These new levels boast no story or cinematics to speak of, though a fair bit can be inferred from the environmental storytelling. For the first set, titled The Shadow of the Cat, Lara Croft returns to Egypt to... I dunno, maybe she wanted to investigate who keeps leaving magnum ammo in these thousand-year-old tombs. After many trials and tribulations, she finds a giant cat statue - I'm talking so big she can walk on its tongue - that's admittedly pretty cool, and then SHE JUST FUCKING LEAVES. At least have her pick up an artifact! Christ...
These Egyptian bonus levels are exquisitely challenging, and the second one is the longest level in the entire game - base or expansion pack. There is quite a lot of precision platforming to be done, much more imminent risk of an untimely death from fall damage, and enemies are in more inconvenient spots. While a lot of assets are reused from the base game, there are some cool new additions, like the aforementioned cat statue, moving wall carvings (I can't believe the Ancient Egyptians invented .gif images!) and a skybox.
The second section, Unfinished Business, has a decidedly less glamorous set of levels on offer. The good news is that you can skip most of the first level entirely if you so desire, and the second one... there's no good news about the second one. It's a slog. It's also the first, and only, level in the entire game that introduces deliberate softlocks. This final level only drops in quality the longer it goes on, feeling increasingly thoughtless in its design, giving Lara insultingly large piles of ammo only because there's way too much of Tomb Raider's weakest link here: combat. It doesn't border on the ridiculous. It is ridiculous. I kind of wish they introduced a level skip for this one too.
Treat this expansion pack as you would the bonus tracks on an album. It's a pleasant surprise when it's as good as the main package, but not all that disappointing when it underwhelms. The Egypt levels are worth a dedicated Tomb Raider fan's time. The Atlantis levels are inessential.
Oh, and in case you're wondering, the Unfinished Business wasn't the friends we made along the way. It's that Lara's gonna fuck all these aliens up so they don't escape and inflict their low-polygon Lovecraftian horror upon the world.
You know when you see someone who's really good at something, and it inspires you to 'git gud' yourself? That's how I felt when watching playthroughs of custom Tomb Raider levels - some on par with the official games - that fans had created using Tomb Raider Level Editor. These guys are crazy, I tell you. They'd created platforming sections that I'd never conceptualized solving before. In fact, that may well be what inspired me to go back and beat the first Tomb Raider game for good.
So when I found out about this expansion pack, with four levels designed for 'expert raiders,' I felt that I was honour-bound to beat them too. I wanna be called an expert raider, even more than I wanna be called mommy's soft submissive boy.
These new levels boast no story or cinematics to speak of, though a fair bit can be inferred from the environmental storytelling. For the first set, titled The Shadow of the Cat, Lara Croft returns to Egypt to... I dunno, maybe she wanted to investigate who keeps leaving magnum ammo in these thousand-year-old tombs. After many trials and tribulations, she finds a giant cat statue - I'm talking so big she can walk on its tongue - that's admittedly pretty cool, and then SHE JUST FUCKING LEAVES. At least have her pick up an artifact! Christ...
These Egyptian bonus levels are exquisitely challenging, and the second one is the longest level in the entire game - base or expansion pack. There is quite a lot of precision platforming to be done, much more imminent risk of an untimely death from fall damage, and enemies are in more inconvenient spots. While a lot of assets are reused from the base game, there are some cool new additions, like the aforementioned cat statue, moving wall carvings (I can't believe the Ancient Egyptians invented .gif images!) and a skybox.
The second section, Unfinished Business, has a decidedly less glamorous set of levels on offer. The good news is that you can skip most of the first level entirely if you so desire, and the second one... there's no good news about the second one. It's a slog. It's also the first, and only, level in the entire game that introduces deliberate softlocks. This final level only drops in quality the longer it goes on, feeling increasingly thoughtless in its design, giving Lara insultingly large piles of ammo only because there's way too much of Tomb Raider's weakest link here: combat. It doesn't border on the ridiculous. It is ridiculous. I kind of wish they introduced a level skip for this one too.
Treat this expansion pack as you would the bonus tracks on an album. It's a pleasant surprise when it's as good as the main package, but not all that disappointing when it underwhelms. The Egypt levels are worth a dedicated Tomb Raider fan's time. The Atlantis levels are inessential.
Oh, and in case you're wondering, the Unfinished Business wasn't the friends we made along the way. It's that Lara's gonna fuck all these aliens up so they don't escape and inflict their low-polygon Lovecraftian horror upon the world.
to me this game is more than a bit overrated having played it somewhat recently. i did really love the enemy design and sort of grandiose baroque weirdness to the details of the world. i wasn't ever particularly enthused by the design of the map compared to most Metroid games even if there are some fun moments. and i really, really hate the stupid inverted castle - it's absolutely not necessary and kind of breaks what is good about the game in the first place. it probably would've helped to not have people constantly talk up this game over the years but i left feeling more than a little disappointed compared to what i expected.