Hey buttbuddz fans today we are going to take a quick look at a video game, and boy is it a stinker. Yeah that’s right, we’re talking about Rise of the Tomb Raider.

When you think about great video games, you realize there are many things which can make for a great video game. Depth, challenge, charm, good story, level design, satsifying mechanics, sound design. We live in a world where games such as Age of Empires 2 and Doom are played for decades thanks to their great design and mechanics, and games like Half Life and Final Fantasy 6 are loved for their timeless stories, creativity and all that stuff.

However, today we are talking about Rise of the Tomb Raider. This game has a terrible story line which rips of Indiana Jones and 30s adventure movies, but changed the fun adventure and enjoyable characters to some trashy drama. The storyline is bad. The characters are cardboard, and we are presented to ancient tropes without any self awareness or interesting twists. This makes for an objectively boring storyline, and it doens’t help that the game tries to make you symphatize with Laura Croft by torturing her at every step. She is always being mauled by bears, hunted down by psychopaths and falling of cliffs. She probably can’t go to the store to buy bread and milk without stepping in a bear trap and falling off a cliff. In fact, bad things happen to her so much that I’m pretty sure the entire development team gets off  to this, and that’s quite nasty I think.

Of course, a video game is about playing a fun game, and a good story is irrelevant as long as we got enjoyable gameplay mechanics, good level design and fun things to do. I am happy to report that Rise of the Tomb Raider doesn’t have any of this. The game might try to trick you into believing that theres a lot of options and paths to take, but the game is linear with a few side paths here and there which reward you with nonsensical bullshit. There is also uncharted-style climbing, which is like watching a lets play of Super Mario 64. You hold down W or something and spam space and there you go you are watching Laura Croft slowly climbing up a wall. This isn’t fun. The game is also a cover based third person shooter. I don’t think I need to say more here, because by definition cover based third person shooters aren’t fun. Linear games can work, but this sure as hell doesn’t. The boring shooting and the boring climbing and the boring paths to walk down makes it feel like you’re on the worlds boringest rollercoaster. The game likes to think it’s survival based too, but you aren’t surviving and barely getting by when you got a bunch of guns and perfect bow and arrow skills on the linear roller coaster.

I don’t want to write more about this game. It’s really bad, and is a good example on what video games shouldn’t be. Video games should be fun times where you explore interesting worlds, meet interesting characters and interact with fun mechanics as the game thinks up new ways to challenge your understanding of the mechanics. Rise of the Tomb Raider is just a crappy rollercoaster designed by a bunch of people who don’t like video games. And also I gotta say, this game is exactly the same as the last Tomb Raider. The story, the gameplay. Nothing has changed. It’s bad. Every time I try to do something fun the game punishes you. Avoid this game at all costs.

TOTAL SCORE: – A pretty bad game which gets 3 coke cans for being boring and terrible. I will spare it the remaining 2 because i guess its competently made. I will also add a single Pepsi can for the good looking environments. This is a very generous score, which I think Square Enix should be happy with.