Marc Cellucci
I mean, just look at that. It’s a screenshot from the abysmal Tomb Raider: Chronicles, the absolute nadir of the series. This was when TR was still very much grid-based, but if the designers could make somewhat normal sized toilets, couldn’t they make a sink you didn’t have to climb on top of to get to the faucet?
In The Beginning
Please don’t worry, this isn’t a deep dive on the history and lore of the Tomb Raider series. There’s plenty of that out there already.
That said… in the beginning, there was Prince of Persia. And it was good. It begat Tomb Raider, which was basically PoP in the third dimension. And it was good, too. And Tomb Raider begat multiple sequels, which gradually became less good, and it also begat Prince of Persia 3D, which was basically a Tomb Raider clone. May the circle, be unbroken…
Having just finished Tomb Raider III via the recently released remastered edition (how’s that for alliteration?), I have decided to present my thoughts on the series, not in series order, but in the order I played them.
Arc of Descent
Tomb Raider was a landmark game. I played it on the Saturn… and just look at those gorgeous graphics! Of course, they don’t hold up today, but this game was like nothing else before it (except Prince of Persia, of course). Everyone focued on Lara Croft and her Madonna-style cones, but real gamers knew where it was at.
Tomb Raider II took Lara out of the tombs, which was fine, but climbing around a boxy version of Venice, with not a soul around, just felt hollow to me. I finished it, but my interest flagged, and when I heard that III was more of the same just hard as hell, I decided to holster the guns for a while.
That changed when I was at Sega.com (where I actually played Prince of Persia 3D on PC), when one of the big announcements was that Eidos and Core would grace the Dreamcast with the fourth Tomb Raider, called The Last Revelation. This was heralded as a return to roots, but TR roots never included situations where you flipped a switch and it didn’t tell you what door it opened, so you had to backtrack forever, then eventually drive to your local game store to get a Prima guide in order to progress.
There is a happy Tomb Raider related story from this time, though. Some friends at I went to a party at, I shit you not, The Oxygen Bar in San Francisco. This was a place where you would pay to have oxygen tubes with aromatics shoved up your nose, and sit there and breathe deeply while contemplating how glad you were to be living in San Francisco in the early 2000s. The… oxygentender? and I hit it off, and she became my girlfriend soon after. One of the things we bonded over was Tomb Raider, which she loved, and she commandeered my Game Boy Color to play the two TR games on that system, where TR became PoP again (May the circle…)
Rise From Your Grave
I skipped out on Chronicles and Angel of Darkness (more on those later), as I felt pretty done with tank controls and watching Lara die.
Then, Core Design was sadly shuttered, and the franchise went to the mighty Crystal Dynamics… and we had good TR games again! The Legend trilogy! The Lara Croft games! Lara Croft GO! We were back, baby. And when the reboot came out in 2013, well hot damn, Tomb Raider was firing on all cylinders, and it only got better from there. I devoured them all eagerly…
Plumbing The Depths
… but then I looked back, and realized I had three major holes in The List™ before I could say I beat the entire series — TR III, Chronicles, and Angel of Darkness.
Ugh.
Chronicles was first, and it is absolutely one of the worst, most soulless games I’ve ever played. We’re talking Don “No Soul” Simmons level of soullessness. The devs have admitted to being burnt out while making it, and it shows. Aside from its impressive bathroom fixtures, it has nothing going for it.
I needed a couple of years to let the wounds heal before diving into Angel of Darkness. It’s just as bad as everyone says, but the main reason is that it’s simply unfinished. They were actually trying some new things, unlike the abomination that is Chronicles. lf given enough time to finish, it would have been a perfectly substandard Tomb Raider game.
I actually had my young boys try to play both of them, and we determined that Angel is “hot garbage,” while Chronicles is “cold garbage.” It was fun to watch them struggle with tank controls. In the end, we determined that hot garbage was slightly less worse than cold.
The Last Aggravation
I was determined to finish the series, though. As a palate cleanser, I played the GBA and DS games, which were all serviceably meh. Now I was ready for the main course, the game I’d been dodging for over 25 years — Tomb Raider III.
My gawd, what a lousy game. It’s like the devs were burnt already, and decided throw up a collective middle finger to the entire world. The stuff they have you do is so nonsensical and arbitrary, and there’s always a spike pit or boulder hidden around the corner to insta-kill you. It’s a masterclass of bad game design.
But when I beat that crappy last boss, I was able to put down the controller, content in the knowledge that there hasn’t been a TR game that I haven’t beaten. And it was all for the sole purpose of bringing you…
The Definitive Tomb Raider Rankings
I’ll keep each of these reviews short, you’ve read enough.
20. Chronicles : Cold garbage.
19. Angel of Darkness: Hot garbage.
18. III: Hard garbage.
17. Legend (DS): Maddening level design.
16. Legend (GBA): Less sucky than the DS one.
15. The Prophecy (GBA): Backtrack-palooza.
14. The Last Revelation: Obtuse.
13. II: Barren.
11. (tie) The GB Color games: Lara Croft as the Prince of Persia.
10. Lara Croft GO: Refreshing.
8. (tie) The Lara Croft games: Even more refreshing.
6. (tie) Legend and Underworld: Solid, solid games.
5. Anniversary: The OG game brilliantly recast.
4. I: The OG still wins though.
3. Tomb Raider (2013): A bold reboot of the series.
2. Rise of the Tomb Raider: 2013 with everything cranked up.
1. Shadow of the Tomb Raider: God tier, and the best TR game yet.
So there it is, my take on the Tomb Raider series. Now I’m going back to playing Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown…
