In order to bring back what was so special about the original Tomb Raider, Core Design has dragged Lara away from her open ended environments and stuck her back into the cave dwellings that made her so successful in the first place. Five thousand years ago a great evil - God Set - was locked away in a tomb to never be unlocked ever again. During an expedition that Lara goes on in Egypt, she unlocks God Set again, and the prophecy proclaims that he will bring plague and death to all of mankind. It is up to Lara to fix her mistake and prevent total Armageddon from engulfing the world. In her way, is not only a race against time, but her arch rival Werner Von Croy, who you learn about in the beginning of the game during the training missions.

Speaking of the training missions, they are, for the most part, useless. When you start up your new game there are a couple of stages that must be completed where you have no weapons and must follow the instructions of your current mentor, Werner Von Croy. He will teach you the various moves that Lara has to use, but at times the instruction on how to pull them off are so vague that it becomes frustrating. One in particular that started to make me rip at my hair was in the first level, where Lara must swing from one side to another with the use of a rope. The game tells you that you have to jump on by holding the action button and release it when you want to get off, but what it doesn’t tell you is that you need to slide down to the bottom of the rope, hold R2 and then release the action button. The training missions end up contributing little to the story, and would have been better if they were optional to go through, instead of mandatory.

There have not been any major advancements in the engine that powers The Last Revelation. It is essentially the same engine, except with some new enhancements and tweaks. Lara has been rounded out a bit more, and doesn’t seem to be as busty as she used to be, but is still is wearing those extra tight clothes that boggle the mind. Her clothes, however, do make a bit more sense this time since she is in the scalding hot desert a lot of the time. Oh well, enough about her apparel. Even though the game takes place in Egypt, the designers have made sure to not make the game that repetitive. Yes, there are repeating textures that will make things seem familiar at times, but for the most part, the game is usually stays fresh from level to level.

Helping to spruce up the gameplay in The Last Revelation are racing sequences that are found throughout the game at certain points. While it is true that they do help in taking a break from raiding all those Egyptian tombs, some problems detract from the overall experience. Enemies will shoot at you from places that are relatively hidden and it’s near impossible to take them out without losing loads and loads of health. Instead, you are forced to make a run for it and run the risk that you might accidentally leap off a cliff, fall into a spiked hole and have to start over again. Another quirk that came up was parking your car diagonally incorrectly can result in not being able to reenter the vehicle at all.

Don’t even attempt to pick up this game unless you are serious about dedicating loads and loads of time to it. Core Design has gone all out with creating this game as large as it can be, but it has resulted in making some levels incredibly huge and a chore to get through. Make sure you do not go into this game under the mentality that it is going to be all shooting action, since there are quite a few puzzles that will absolutely baffle you at times. At first, the puzzles that are in The Last Revelation will seem illogical and have no apparent solution, but once you either figure it out or find the answer through other means, you’ll be hitting yourself going “Why didn’t I think of that?” I know I did that more than a couple times during my adventures with Lara.