The bit at the beginning where you play as a Haze marine is quite simply terrible, as you’re forced to suffer the terrible dialogue between your fellow marines as you liberally use the infamous drug which makes everyone glow. When in this jacked-up state you’re pretty much invincible. In my playthrough I only died once, when the pesky rebels set me on fire, but in all fairness this was only because I didn’t know how to put myself out (shake the pad). This opening section playing as the nasty marines is a rather short affair, only making up about a fifth of the game - but the constant interruptions for cutscenes combined with boring gameplay make it a real struggle to push through nonetheless.

Once you manage to push past this bit you’ll be rewarded with a slightly less crap experience. Joy.

If you do manage to push through the monotony you’ll sadly find the grass isn’t much greener on the other side: Dialogue is slightly more bearable and there are some fairly fun moments to be had, but the mechanics that are supposed to make the rebels substantially different from the Haze marines simply don’t work. You can play dead, but your health regenerates in a couple of seconds anyway, so it’s usually easier to just step to the side and take a breather. You can disarm your foes to steal their weapons, but by the time you get close enough to a Haze marine to do so he’ll have probably gunned you down. Sure, you can shoot the little yellow packs on the back of Haze marines to send them loco and start attacking everyone in sight, but unsurprisingly this doesn’t really work either. Aiming isn’t precise enough to quickly get a shot on them, and most of the time they’ll just turn and shoot you when thrown into a state of loco-ness. You can also prime grenades with the marine’s special brand of gloopy madness, but I personally found this to be next to useless, only using this tactic successfully maybe two or three times throughout the campaign, which stretches over a period of 6 or 7 hours.

So, that’s the completely unrewarding single player out of the way, at least. What about the multiplayer? At first it appears to show a lot of promise, there are a handful of maps each with a mission that ties into the story of the campaign, which is admittedly a very nice touch. These can be fun at times, a level aboard the Haze marine land carrier is actually very good, but with no one talking, no one playing as a team, and no one seeming to want to try and complete the objective, the experience quickly feels hollow; everyone gunning alone and just going for kills. It’s a problem that plagues even the best of online games admittedly, but here it really sticks out since you have to work together to get the job done.

Like single player the differences between the rebels and Haze marines doesn’t really make a difference. Rebels will glow for the Haze marines and the Rebels can play dead, but everyone knows the rebels play dead and so whenever I tried it a grenade was swiftly thrown on the floor next to my ’corpse’. Essentially it just turns the whole conflict into rebels versus space marines who can see in the dark, which isn’t very interesting when you put it like that, is it? There are also the usual deathmatch and team deathmatch modes to dabble with, both complete with some of the worst cases of team killing I’ve ever seen.

Multiplayer serving suggestion - Actual levels of in-game fun may vary.

That’s that then, give this one a miss. The single player might be worth a look in a few years time when you can find it for a fiver but I really couldn’t recommend anyone spend £40 on this.