Free Climbing.
Tomb Raider III hit in late 1998, right on schedule, building on II’s improvements. Derbyshire actress Judith Gibbins returned, having taken over from Blond in II, to give Lara a deep, cultured purr. Animations added new details, like shell casings ejecting from guns. New moves, new vehicles, new weapons, new threats, five huge worlds to solve and a fun story to follow… all the notes rang true and strong.
After chasing down a jungle-fevered lunatic in India to retrieve the legendary Infada stone, Lara learned it was actually a meteorite fragment sought by Willard, a Scottish scientist working to excavate the meteor itself in Antarctica. Intrigued, she agreed to help track down three more fragments scattered around the globe by sailors on the HMS Beagle during Darwin’s famous voyage.
Early on, the team at Core decided to let Lara do more above-ground work than before, and let players take on the fragments in any order they wanted. Some felt a Tomb Raider should be tomb-focused, but modern settings didn’t make for any less of a challenge. Lara was caught sneaking into Area 51 (on a none-too-subtle quad bike) and had to stealth-game past soldiers, stealing “Element 51” from a UFO on her way out. On a South Pacific island, she dealt with cannibals and quicksand, got help thinning the dinosaur population from the locals, and avoided piranha while kayaking the rapids of Madubu Gorge. In London, Lara got a first-hand look at what the fragments could do going up against immortal cosmetics executive Sophia Leigh and the Damned, her discarded, disfigured experiments.
Naturally, when Lara joined Willard in the Antarctic, she found he’d experimented on his own dig crew… and on himself. His obsession with evolution, and the meteorite’s ability to accelerate it, transformed him into a hideous arachnid creature, which Lara quickly made extinct.
With III pulling a critical and commercial hat trick, Eidos started cashing in on past successes. The first two games were re-released as Gold Editions, featuring new levels and nothing more. Unfinished Business and The Golden Mask occasionally expanded on existing stories, and The Lost Artifact reconned a fifth meteor fragment and a rematch against Sophia Leigh, but other improvements were slight to nonexistent. So many Tomb Raiders in one year, with another always due before long, rapidly over-saturated the Lara market. Some suspected she’d already peaked.
By the time Core ramped up development on The Last Revelation, they’d been in a constant state of development crunch for nearly four years. The strain showed.
Judith Gibbins left the series, replaced by Jonell Elliott’s slightly tinny voice. Also absent was the typical globe-hopping. Lara limited her raiding to Egypt for thirty-three out of thirty-five levels, and started things off by swiping the absolutely wrong trinket. All things considered, it was bound to happen at some point. Taking the Amulet of Horus from its resting place also unboxed the apocalypse in the form of Set, Egyptian God of Chaos. The solution: assemble the Armour of Horus, summoning Set’s greatest enemy for an old fashioned godfight. Hounding her every step was Werner Von Croy, once Lara’s adventuring mentor, now her nemesis… and Set’s puppet.
Revelation clocked in as the largest Raider yet, but technically the advancements were slim. Lara kicked down doors, swapped ammo types, combined items in her inventory. Her animations marginally improved. It made a solid game, but in some ways Revelation felt identical to the Gold Editions; more levels, less innovation. Most at Core felt they’d exhausted the possibilities. Some dreaded another crunch year in service to Lara.
The solution was obvious: kill her.
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