I have to hand it to Tomb Raider Reloaded's developers. They took it upon themselves to step back from the gritty survival tone taken by recent Tomb Raider games and answer the question that's been burning since the first Tomb Raider game came out in 1996. What if Tomb Raider was not about a gunslinging adventurer but about how to design a confusing microtransaction system to empty wallets?

Yes, I'm being sarcastic here, nobody asked for this, but it's hard to generate any emotion beyond frustration about this soulless cash grab known as Tomb Raider Reloaded. There's some enjoyable gameplay at the heart of it, similar to Archero and its clones, but the route to get there involves winding your way through a torturous series of screens, all throwing in-game currency and items at you faster than Lara Croft whips out her trusty pistols.

In order to illustrate the title's gameplay, I recorded the above video after completing the first couple of missions. The game doesn't waste much time throwing you into the action; a short intro sets up the background, then you'll be instantly launched into your first dungeon. Tomb Raider Reloaded teaches you gameplay mechanics by simply chucking you into your first mission, a wise choice for an action game like this. You can expect a max framerate of 60FPS, and I didn't encounter any bugs during gameplay.

Gameplay is basic but challenging and satisfying

Before we get into why Tomb Raider Reloaded is so problematic, let's talk about the gameplay. It's dead simple to learn and is the only spark of joy you'll find in the game. Drag your finger around an on-screen joystick, and Lara Croft will bop along in the indicated direction. Stop moving, and Lara will halt and unload her arsenal on the nearest enemy. If it seems too simple to begin with, stick with it. You'll be grateful for it when you're avoiding traps and monsters while trying to achieve a time-sensitive objective. There's no controller support, as this game is designed around a vertical screen with touch controls.

The game's levels are a mix of stages containing a random assortment of puzzles, traps, and monsters. Defeat all the monsters, and you'll advance to the next stage. Scattered throughout the level are mini-bosses, with a final boss in the last stage. Some of the bosses are genuinely challenging when you first encounter them but won't pose a threat if you prepare for them the second time around. A wealth of upgrades and weapons keeps the gameplay from becoming stale; you'll soon discard the classic pistols in favor of more exotic weapons.

You'll get one revive during a run, but a second death will mean a full restart of that level. However, you'll get to use the items you've gathered to buy and upgrade gear, level up, and complete missions. Properly armed, you can return to the level and sweep through it easily. It sounds straightforward in theory, but in reality, the process of upgrading your gear is a tortuous progression through an unnecessary amount of menus.

Tomb Raider Reloaded is a game of numbers not fun

Between missions in Tomb Raider Reloaded, you can collect daily rewards, earn ancient scrolls, check out limited-time deals, complete daily and weekly tasks, complete goals, claim a second kind of daily reward, receive exploration rewards, craft gear, buy in-game currency, open crates, break down items, level up items, upgrade relics, and redeem stickers. What does all this do? It makes the numbers on your character go up. And if you want to beat the later levels with ease, you'll have to complete this torturous process between every mission.

Hooray.

Tomb Raider Reloaded knows what it's doing. It knows that you love the feeling of earning rewards and hopes you won't notice how meaningless it is by bombarding you with too many to think about. The entire system of rewards could be condensed into one or two menus, but of course, that would mean putting the player first instead of their wallet.

Tomb Raider Reloaded is a game clinically designed to make you feel happy. It's analyzed and studied the results of playtests and calculated just what it needs to make you pony up some cash. It's a system we've seen repeated across a million mobile games, but that doesn't excuse it. Tomb Raider Reloaded is a game for machines, not people, and I have no regrets about saying you should not play this game. Want the best bullet hell fun on the Play Store? Go play Vampire Survivors. Looking to scratch that roguelike itch? Dead Cells is one of the best roguelikes on Android. Want to see how to fairly monetize a franchise? Marvel Snap is the most innovative card game on the Play Store.

If you're a Netflix subscriber, you can avoid all these microtransactions by downloading the Netflix Games version of Tomb Raider Reloaded. This removes all microtransactions without changing the core gameplay loop.