How Fly is a new segment for MEGATONik, designed to help you get the best out of your Gamefly experience.  The worst feeling you can get from a Gamefly game is to pop it in, and have it suck; then you have to wait a week to get your new game, which also may or may not suck.  Also, you don’t really want to rent a massive epic like Persona 4 from Gamefly, having it sitting at your house for several months taking up a spot in your Q. This is not a review of a game as a whole; this is how good of a rental a game is.  A game may be great, but a poor rental; a game may just be a terrible value at full price, but a great rental; and it may be somewhere in between.  So, with that said, How Fly is Lara Croft’s latest (from a kind of long while ago)?

Well, this review will probably be about as short as my time spent with this game.  Tomb Raider: Underworld is not fly at all.  It’s about as fly as a penguin, who can’t even fly in the first place, who got his wings cut off.  I was hoping to pick up a tomb-robbin’ action adventure fix to tide me over until Uncharted 2 drops in October, but instead I got a half-assed platformer with half-assed puzzle design, shitty combat, and a cracked out camera.

You’re going to be missing jumps all the time because the camera makes it difficult to really tell where you’re jumping, or it will be at an awkward angle that means you need to point your left stick just a LITTTTLE bit more to the left if you wanna jump to that ledge, instead of into the abyss of some terrible chasm.  Also, don’t get TOO close to that ledge you want to jump up to, because instead of jumping up Lara will just do this weird wall-hump/head slam thing until you back up and try again.

The puzzles are also ridiculously stupid and tedious.  I didn’t get past the FIRST level, but I quickly picked up on the fact that the devs, instead of making a puzzle kind of cool or interesting, instead opted to just make you do everything twice to inflate game time.  AWESOME.

The combat is also terrible.  You don’t really aim, you just kind point in the direction of stuff and let the auto-aim take over…. it’s not incredibly exciting, to say the least.
Last, let’s talk about Lara herself.  I feel like Tomb Raider is kind of the video game equivalent of a Hooters; sure, it’s not the best food/gameplay out there, but man oh man, BOOBS, AM I RIGHT BRO?  HELL YEAH HIGH FIVE MORE COORS LIGHT!!! But, Lara doesn’t even look all that hot.  Her skin has this really weird pallor to it, and her face is in this weird scrunched up look all the time that is just not attractive.  Also, the game has this mechanic where your character model gets dirtier as you go through the levels.  What this means in the first level, where Lara is wearing a one-piece swimsuit that shows half her ass and doesn’t even have leggings or ANY KIND OF COVERING OVER YOUR FEET AS YOU SWIM THROUGH SHARK INFESTED WATERS AND THEN CLIMB THROUGH A CRUMBLING TOMB THAT PROBABLY HAS SHARP ROCKS ALL OVER THE FLOOR DID YOU EVEN THINK ABOUT THIS GAME AT ALL JESUS CHRIST DEVELOPERS… anyway, what this means in Lara’s wetsuit is that it looks like she pooped her pants.  Pretty hot, dudes.

So, basically, don’t rent this game.  It’s a less than mediocre platformer that is a waste of your time and your GameQ.  Just put in Uncharted.