Tomb Raider Chronocles seems to me more like an expansion to the fourth part or a DLC. First of all, you don't play a coherent story in this game, but several smaller episodes that are a kind of memoir of your earlier adventures, while the family and butler Winston mourn the tragic loss of their beloved archeologist. On the one hand, it's more of the classic Tomb Raider experience familiar from previous games, but on the other, it shows how badly this four-year-old concept has aged and was exploited one more time.

Some ideas or mechanics, such as the diving suit in the second section of the game or the stealth mechanic in the last section to silently eliminate enemies are creative innovations and offer a lot of potential, but you quickly realize how little this potential is actually used. The levels are short, mostly relatively lovelessly cobbled together and the last chapter in particular is buggy as hell. Even the new features that the game has to offer only seem to have been added somewhere at the end, just so that you have them at least once. You can see that the development team that worked on this game had no motivation or passion and Eidos wanted to bring the game to market as quickly as possible.

You can argue about the individual ideas of the scenarios, for example. The third chapter is set in Ireland with the young 16-year-old Lara, who has no weapons and the focus is on platforming and puzzles. In fact, it's all about quite surreal stories with ghosts, demons and other supernatural events and even though Tomb Raider is known for its supernatural elements, this section seems a bit over the top. Although I personally liked the gothic creepy atmosphere. The final section puts Lara in a Mission Impossible scenario where she has to break into a high security lab and fight cyborgs that look like the guy from Hitman. So that doesn't really fit in with a series in which you were originally traveling in historical locations and raiding tombs. But that's a matter of taste. I had the feeling that they were trying to introduce various pop culture elements from that time and satisfy their fans.

However, the amount of shortcuts and half-baked ideas that the developers have put into this game is frustrating. If more time had been put into development the overall potential of the game would have been better realized. On top of that, problems from past games continue to occur and the inconsistent searching for solutions to puzzles are still present. The levels should have been designed more in the direction of the new mechanics so that it would feel more like an improvement to the franchise. Instead, we got this half-finished game with a lack of polish. And it's so bad that game-breaking bugs are also present.

I don't know if this is the same as in the PlayStaion version of the game, because as a port it has caused numerous problems on the PC version, but I had a huge problem in the last level of the game to get through an exit door. When you save and reload the game, you trigger certain scripting problems so that the last door didn't open for me. For this reason it was necessary to load an older previous savegame and complete the last level without dying. In a level where you have a shortage of ammunition, tough enemies that can be only defeated by certain circumstances, numerous death traps and on top of that you are hunted by a helicopter shooting through the glass windows of the building... I really don't know how many times I had to reload the game to complete this section in one go.

You can often forgive such flaws in games if the overall experience of the game is still somehow enjoyable. For example, I consider the fourth Tomb Raider installment as a good game, which despite the many frustrating elements was still a solid game where you can see that the developers have made an effort. But the last level in particular destroyed my experience and my already fading enjoyment for me, making it one of the games I would probably never touch again. And therefore I can't recommend it to anyone. Seriously, skip this game or try in in the Remastered Version. I didn't play it, but i assume they fixed many of the appearing bugs.