You don't need the box to play for free, you can just e-mail TR support and they will send you a retail code. Then you can download the game from them yourself. I did it myself. While there is an antiquated attachment to boxes, ultimately they are just wasteful. I say this as someone who used to work in bookstores and also advocates moving to digital books because the mass production of books in modern times is very wasteful as well.

As for TR, I played it in Beta and have been playing it lately. The environments and story elements are very good. However, the gameplay itself is very repetitive. After playing for a while the sound of my machine gun follows me in my sleep. You really just figure out the combat tactic that works best and use it over and over again. The repetitiveness limits the replayability as well because having to redo anything is that much more tedious. The content is very linear and really feels more like a single-player RPG with multiplayer mode than an actual MMO. It probably would've been more profitable and even successful to craft it as such, or to have created a different server model that was more sustainable. I feel there is a market for small scale MMOs (Not-So-Massively Multiplayer) but so far haven't seen anyone willing to pursue it.

Ultimately, I can see how people would get bored with this game pretty quickly and leave. The linear nature and the repetitiveness really give a sense of running out of interesting things to do quickly.