Hidden & Dangerous 2

Review - Sam tries to separate the wheat from the chafe in Take 2's latest.

No freaking co-operative play. This can only be yet another example of how this game is unfinished; hurried out the door by a publisher so eager to get Hiddy Dan to market that he hasn't had time to put his tie on straight or do up his laces. I played the original with my mates over the LAN and it was some of the finest gaming fun I have ever experienced. This time round there's no option but to battle the Nazi scum in the company of the computer and its cornucopia of glitches and faults. Of course we are promised the return of this feature in an expansion pack and if I didn't have to review this game then I would have waited until said pack made an appearance.

Since the first Hidden and Dangerous crawled up to the frontline, almost fatally wounded yet possessing a flair for combat that would see it over the top, its presentation of WW2 battles in full 3D-o-vision has been copied many times over. Yet back in 1999 H&D lived in such a rarefied world that many people were able to forgive its horrendous number of bugs, its scrappy ordering system and predilection to crashing. Fast forward to 2003 and there's a near glut of WW2 based games, the vast majority of which come in three-dimensional flavours. On top of that, the number of tactical shooters available are greater in number than bullets in a Sten gun magazine. So, on its return to the line, is the H&D series now a hardened veteran or does it continue to cower behind the nearest available cover? If it's the former we will have a new WW2 king. If it's the latter then H&D 2 is headed for an early grave since at this point in the campaign the battlefield is all torn up and there ain't even a branch left to hide behind.

Well things get off to a worse start then the Omaha beach landings. The installer is cack, asking me to reinsert the very CDs that I just removed so as to put in the next disk. An inauspicious start. Once this minor hurdle was bypassed I was treated to one of the more inept looking intro movies I have witnessed in the last few months. After the professionalism of Call of Duty to have to watch ugly models that look like they have been animated by Tony Hart's ghost was no fun at all. And as this intro movie uses the in-game engine a fog of creeping depression began to swirl around my ankles. Already feeling like I've taken part in a five mile march I sucked in my chest and headed off in the direction of the tutorial. A familiar training ground roughly rendered in a PS2 stlyee was the reward for my effort. Taking control of one of the identical looking soldiers I hacked my way through a tedious trial of my patience. The controls - Arrrgh! Nein! Nein! Aieeee! Checking to make sure my clothes were still on and there was no melted sphere shape around me I struggled to comprehend why on earth a developer would release a title in 2003 where the default movement keys were the cursor keys. For all the myriad of faults that I was to come across while reviewing this title this struck me the hardest. A good case can be made against the publishers for releasing a game so plainly unready for anything other than the Christmas market but the default key choices show a developer seriously out of touch with any progress that PC games have made since 1999. Once the keys were remapped problems remained. Even though I am willing to attribute some blame to the few pints I'd had previously, any game which makes such a production out of getting a man to climb a ladder is in need of some serious re-working.