I’m
somewhat embarrassed to admit that, prior to playing The Last Revelation, I
had never played a Tomb Raider game. Although I consider myself a connoisseur
of action-adventure games, I intentionally avoided the Tomb Raider series
simply because I assumed that the Core team had put their collective effort into
developing Lara Croft’s chest as opposed to developing a quality game experience,
and I didn’t feel like supporting that type of entertainment. When I was given
the opportunity to review The Last Revelation, there were two reasons that
I agreed to do so. The first reason was that since I hadn’t played any of the
other games, it would be very easy for me to judge the game on its own merits,
as opposed to comparing it with the previous games in the series; the second reason
was that I wanted to test my assumption and find out if the state of computer
gaming was as bad as I thought.

I installed the game, and expected the worst
… and the worst never came. In fact, I have very few negative comments about
The Last Revelation. I found the game to be quite entertaining, with challenging
puzzles and excellent graphics. Here’s the breakdown.

What’s Going on
Here?

The game opens with you playing the young Lara Croft, just starting
her education with the famous archeologist Werner Von Croy. While attempting to
obtain a valuable artifact, Von Croy is trapped inside an ancient temple, and
Lara barely escapes. From this moment forward, Von Croy and Lara are enemies …
skipping forward to present-day Egypt, we help Lara reach the Amulet of Horus,
which inadvertently releases the evil power of the Egyptian god Set. In order
to stop Set, Lara must reawaken the god Horus with various artifacts scattered
in different Egyptian locales, all the while avoiding Von Croy.

The entire
story is told through the in-game movies; this plot is sufficient to tie the different
levels and locales together, but it seemed a little bit shallow to me. It’s my
impression, though, that gamers don’t play the Tomb Raider series for the
plot–there’s a deeper exploration motive behind the attraction.

Overall
Plot Grade: B

How
Did it Look?

Let me begin by saying that I still disapprove of Lara’s
build. Perhaps I’m a prude, but I think that the entire series would not have
suffered at all if a more physically realistic female model had been used, and
I would have preferred it. If this aspect of the game is ignored (and once I started
playing, I found this very easy to do), The Last Revelation gets very high
marks in the graphics department.

I was most impressed with the attention
to detail in the game. For example, while firing your pistols, the shells from
the bullets fly out of the guns, clattering to the ground … but if Lara’s standing
near water, the shells actually splash into the water and sink. The integration
of this effect is so seamless that I didn’t even notice it the first time; I found
myself aimlessly firing my weapons just to see the effect. Lara’s ponytail is
another effect that you have to see to believe–it moves when she does, just like
a real ponytail would. If Lara’s standing in a breeze, her hair reflects the wind’s
direction. (I tried to wrap it around her neck by turning in a circle in a stiff
wind, but was unsuccessful–that would have been a very challenging programming
effort, indeed) My only complaint with the ponytail effect is similar to the complaint
I have with the blowing coattail effect in Nocturne–it was as if the blown object
suddenly took on the physical properties of tissue paper, as opposed to something
with more mass. An additional detail that took me by surprise was the moisture
that drips off of Lara after she jumps out of water. The developer didn’t just
turn on “drip” for fifteen seconds after she reaches dry land–the dripping
rate actually decreases the longer Lara is out of the water. Bravo!

The
character animation is also very well done. All of the actions that Lara performs
during the game look exactly as if a real person were performing them … with
the exception of running. What is so complex about running that makes animating
it so difficult? When I run, my upper body moves up and down as my legs bend and
extend (and yes, for those of you who read my
review of Fear Effect, I still look silly while doing it). I don’t
know how to run and keep my head from bobbing up and down, but apparently all
of the characters in The Last Revelation have discovered this secret. I
probably wouldn’t have noticed it if the rest of the motion wasn’t so picture-perfect.

The
environments that are explored by Lara during the game are elegantly rendered,
and in some cases, nearly historically accurate. My only issue with the architecture
is that it appeared too new to be thousands of years old; I suppose that I should
chalk the appearance up to the presence of the Egyptian spirits in the tombs and
suspend my disbelief, but 2000-year-old tombs should be dusty, crumbly, faded
places. Depth of field does not come into play very often, as most of the game
is played within enclosed spaces, but when outside, I had no problems seeing far
enough into the distance to make out new, unexplored structures.

The one
part of the graphics experience that I found lacking was the in-game movies. When
the game switches to these movies, as opposed to those movies that are regenerated
using the graphics engine, the image quality was a few notches below “great”
in my book. I think the compression factor used when these movies were generated
was too large and should have been decreased. There aren’t very many of these
movies, though, so it doesn’t take much away from the experience.

Overall
Graphics Grade: A-

How Did it Sound?

Certain parts of the
sound in The Last Revelation made a direct hit with me. For example, when
Lara solves a puzzle and enters a new area, a brief symphonic epiphany accompanies
her entrance. This feature had multiple effects on me; on the one hand, I felt
like I actually accomplished something, and on the other hand, it added a certain
cinematic flavor to the game. The music pushed my puzzle-solving attitude from
attentive to enthusiastic, and really added something to the game. This same technique
was used, with a snippet of foreboding tones, to alert you when enemies were approaching.
Excellent!

Overall,
this is a quiet game, with very low background music. I’m not sure if I can even
call it music–perhaps moody atmospherics is a better term for it. Most of the
sound effects in the game are well above the ambient background tones, with a
few notable exceptions. I discovered early in the game that certain objects, when
set into motion by a lever or switch, made very little noise. Gigantic wheels,
boulders, and other weighty objects simply did not make noise at what I thought
was the appropriate volume, and it cost me in a number of occasions. I didn’t
get the auditory clue that something had happened, so I painstakingly reexplored
the area, only to find that the obstacle had already moved!

Probably the
least satisfying part of the auditory experience was the voice acting. In fact,
I think this is a global issue with gaming. I’ve started, and not finished, a
number of pure adventure games recently, only to stop because the voices were
done so inadequately that I couldn’t stand to listen to one more minute. The voice
acting in The Last Revelation isn’t horrible, but there’s a definite lack
of feeling in the actors’ voices. If the plot had been more involved, or there
had been significantly more verbal sequences in the game, this might have had
a larger impact on my opinion.

Overall Sound Grade: A-

Was
it Fun?

As I stated above, this was my first experience with a Tomb
Raider game. My initial reaction to the game’s controls was fairly negative;
having recently played System Shock 2, I was extremely surprised to find
that the mouse served absolutely no purpose! Lara is exclusively controlled via
keyboard, which took some getting used to. My initial frustration with the keys
eventually disappeared with practice, but it was apparent throughout the game
that a hand-held controller of some kind would have been a better choice (I assume
that the console versions of this game are not quite as difficult to deal with).
My main problem was not dealing with the keys themselves, but with the combinations
of keys necessary to perform different acrobatic maneuvers. I found it nearly
impossible to perform a diving roll while “dashing,” and I did not master
the standard roll until midway through the game. The most irritating aspect of
the controls, however, was an error in the documentation–I found myself unable
to get out of a jeep after one of the faster-paced action sequences. The key that
was documented in the manual (the “End” key) simply did not work. It
was only through a particularly helpful website that I discovered the correct
combination of keys necessary (“Jump” plus “Left”) to leave
the jeep behind, and I never would have guessed it myself. (I played the “Millennium”
edition of The Last Revelation, so I am not sure if the standard release
of the game also has this documentation error.)

Knowing the controls did
not necessarily imply that I could do what I wanted to in the game. The standard
actions, like jumping, crawling onto ledges, and activating objects, were executed
perfectly. Swimming, however, was another matter. I consistently became stuck,
and had to restore a saved game, while swimming through narrow areas. Additionally,
swinging from one rope to another makes an appearance on my list of “most
irritating game sequences of all time.” Although these actions do not occur
very frequently during the game, it is still a crime to put a gamer through this
level of annoyance.

The puzzles in The Last Revelation almost completely
make up for the difficult control system. There are some truly exceptional puzzles
in this game, including playing an ancient board game (Senet) and using an enemy
to help you proceed. Many of the puzzles are of the standard “find the item
and put it here” variety that exist in every third-person action-adventure
game, but there are so many additional puzzle types that these are a welcome change.
Another nifty type of puzzle present in The Last Revelation is the “don’t
forget that your character can do that” type, requiring that your character
swing along the edge of a flatbed car on a train instead of climbing the insurmountable
load it carries. Some of the sequences in this game are truly difficult–without
a walkthrough, I would have never been able to continue, simply because my mind
was closed as to the possible solutions. “Think outside the box” became
my mantra as I progressed, and in the process, I learned a few basic facts about
the Tomb Raider universe that seasoned fans are probably fully aware of.
(It didn’t take me too long to figure out that what you see in a mirror might
be different that what you see in reality–big clue.) Having played adventure/puzzle
games for twenty years, I found some of the puzzles in this game to be extremely
refreshing and creative, while others were borderline impossible. The pleasure
of solving these, though, reminded me why I like this kind of game in the first
place.

Overall Gameplay Grade: B+

All told, I had a great time
playing The Last Revelation, with the exceptions I listed above. In fact,
I enjoyed it so much that I’ve purchased the first two games in the series (for
the Playstation, though–hopefully I’ll be able to deal with the controls a bit
more intuitively that way). There’s a minor amount of violence in this game–nothing
much worse than what’s on Saturday morning cartoons these days, so it’s appropriate
for most kids over age ten. (Many thanks to Mark Lawlor for helping me out of
some tough situations, and to Stella
for walkthrough hosting above the call of duty.)

Final Grade: A-

PC
System Requirements: Pentium II 266 MHz Processor
or equivalent without hardware 3D acceleration
Pentium II 233 MHz Processor
or equivalent with hardware 3D acceleration
Windows 95/98 compatible computer
system with
16MB of RAM (32MB recommended)
DirectX 6.1 or higher (included)

4X CD-ROM
4 MB Video Card
100% DirectX 6.1 or higher compliant sound card

Keyboard and mouse