Robert Ludlum's The Bourne Conspiracy

These are a bit more hit-and-miss. They have their moments, usually when the developer's getting the most out of the Unreal Engine 3: fighting your way out of a burning distillery, for instance, and going hand-to-hand with military police on a rooftop as red sniper beams cut past you in the direction of the camera. When they're well-lit, the character models are muscular and convincing and the fight animations are superb. But for the most part these levels are meandering, ugly and overlong, and the linearity grates. The airport level is a contrived procession up and down escalators, through fenced off duty-free shops and food courts and down a subway before ending up on a cargo plane, and wherever you go you're treated to plenty of corridors, offices, kitchens, alleyways and locked doors, served up between inconsistently spaced automatic save checkpoints.

There's a bit of deviation from the above that's worth noting. The initial sprint through the US embassy when you're told not to kill anyone is quite frantic and arresting, and there's also the car chase, which makes good use of the Bourne Instinct to help you steer through packed intersections and panicked motorists in slow-motion, although the rest of the level falls flat thanks to rubbish handling, and canned dramatic detours down alleyways and through glass shop-fronts.

This sort of thing would be easier to tolerate if the fight-and-shoot gameplay was going anywhere, but it doesn't. You'll chuckle along to the first dozen or so hand-to-hand takedowns, but "weaponising" the environment - using fire extinguishers, pens and other props to pull off different takedowns - always amounts to the same thing with a slightly different animation, and there's no evolution of the core combinations, just less tolerance of mistakes and impatience. You'll come to resent the boss enemies' resilience and patterns, too - the inevitable production of a knife, and never taking damage when you block their attempted takedowns, even though you do if the opposite happens to you.

Shooting never gets any better, either, as you struggle to target people until you've shot them enough to trigger the spinning-round-firing-helplessly death animation or an unconvincing contextual topple over a railing. The gun takedowns, which also use quick-time events, don't look as good as the hand-to-hand ones, although you'll still try and use them to avoid more shooting. After games like Gears of War, Uncharted and GTA IV, Bourne's alternative is a letdown.

Bland and repetitious level design and uneven gameplay isn't a very glamorous problem to have, but in the end it fits. Even the in-game advertising is boring: no, we don't want a MasterCard, but thanks for asking on every billboard in every level. You aren't going to "Become Bourne", as the box instructs, because that would be difficult, so you just perform simple approximations of a few of the things he did in the films over and over again as the game pushes you down set paths. There's no multiplayer, and for replay value all you've got is the option to hunt for glowing passports a few paces off the beaten and boring track.