I beat this game almost 25 years ago on Tuesday, May 29, 2001, 12:29 PM. I graduated high school and was on a summer break before college started. It was the perfect time to finish the game. I would play video games during the day when it was unbearably hot (100F+ degrees) and play cricket in the evening. Life was different back then.
This was the second game I ever played – Tomb Raider III being the first. If I remember correctly, I got a copy of the game from a friend. I played this game on a Intel Celron PC with 16MB RAM, 2GB hard drive, running Windows 98. There was no dedicated video card. It would be a few years before I acquire my first GPU – an Inno 3D Nvidia GeForce 2 MX.
Tomb Raider IV: The Last Revelation opens in an interesting way. It begins with a young Lara Croft on an adventure in Cambodia, which doubles as a tutorial. For the first time in the series, Croft Manor is absent. I wasn’t a fan of that change. The tutorial levels also cannot be skipped. They’re enjoyable the first time through, but not great on replays because of the game’s slower pacing. I’m still not sure why the developers chose that route. I do like the idea of an origin story for Lara, but I wish it had been handled a little differently – especially when replaying today.
Following the Cambodia levels, the game picks up in Egypt, and Lara Croft is literally tomb raiding. After navigating through a lot of danger, she enters the Burial Chamber of Set, the God of Chaos, to retrieve the Amulet of Horus. The moment she lifts the amulet from the sarcophagus, a curse is released. The rest of the game is spent trying to undo the damage she has caused. That’s about the extent of my understanding of the plot.
The entire adventure is set in Egypt. No more globe trotting for what was supposed to be the last Tomb Raider game. I thought they did an amazing job with the ending. I do not understand how they took this near-perfect ending and came up with the story of Angel of Darkness, which is probably the worst mainline Tomb Raider game ever made.
I am going to talk about the game from the perspective of someone who played it back in 2001. Gameplay is very similar to the previous games. Back then, it felt perfectly normal to play a 3rd person game without the use of a mouse. By the time I got to playing Tomb Raider Chronicles, the controls started to feel very old, because I played other games such as Max Payne, and it was clear that Tomb Raider’s control scheme is not the way of the future. I briefly played this game a couple of years ago, and it was rough. It’s playable and the gameplay still holds up, but it took some getting used to. I had to rewire my brain to a completely different way of playing.
Tomb Raider III was a tough game to start my Tomb Raider journey. I did not realize this at the time, but it is infamous for its difficulty. I just assumed that Tomb Raider games were supposed to be so difficult. I needed a walkthrough for that game from the get-go. My 17-year-old non-gamer brain just couldn’t figure out the puzzles. Tomb Raider IV is not quite as difficult. I gained some experience at this point, and I was able to make my way through the levels initially without too much difficulty.
However, there are some levels that are notoriously bad due to their arbitrary design – especially levels with underwater puzzles, and guardians that cannot be killed. Back then the only option was to read the walk-through, memorize as much as possible, and start the game and play it – Alt-Tab didn’t work very well for 3D applications.
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There is also quite a bit of backtracking. None of the previous games had this kind of level design. It can be a hit or miss. I did not mind this in Karnak and Alexandria, but the Cairo levels were especially hard to navigate. You just had to know what the developers were thinking. If this were a modern game, all the levels would be one gigantic map with different sections, as opposed to multiple levels, but there was no way console hardware would have supported that back in the day.
Graphics received some improvements. This is one of those games where the art style and music are so good that graphics fidelity does not matter too much. This really feels like a Tomb Raider game because of the setting, which is literally in tombs for the most part. This is a departure from the previous two games, where the definition of a tomb was stretched very thin. CGI cutscenes are well done, but in-game cutscenes did not age well. I feel like they should have just stuck to CGI cutscenes only.
No Tomb Raider game is complete without mentioning the voice acting. It is very good. Jonell Elliott did a wonderful job. Hard for me to say which Tomb Raider had the best voice actor, but I think her voice suits Lara Croft better than the one from the reboot trilogy.
In conclusion, I would not say this is an all-time classic, but it’s a very solid game. I do think this is better than Tomb Raider III though. The first game is still the greatest in the series, which is insane considering it was released back in 1996. So, should you play this game for the first time in 2026? I would say yes, and I would recommend Tomb Raider IV-VI Remastered
I did not play the remastered version of the game, but I heard good things about it. I would not spend the asking price of $29.99 — pick it up on sale instead.