Cyberstorm 2: Corporate Wars

If you've already picked up the box and run your mince pies down the game's features, then you might have been seriously tempted into buying this 'straight to video' title. It's a real-time strategy game that has a turn-based option as well as a nonlinear campaign, customisable units and financial and research elements. On paper it's quite an impressive list. Install the thing, however, and you soon find out that the game is devoid of any style. It does everything it promises, but with no real effort. You get the feeling that the developers all worked in separate rooms, probably meeting for the first time at the game's launch.

On the plus side, pre - and post-mission sections lend the game purpose. You are the master of your own destiny, trying to balance budgets while financing a war against seven Pepsico-sized competitors. Then, as soon as you start the next mission, you remember it's all a cheap ruse designed to fool you. The illusion is broken by the second-rate graphics, simple animation and pathetic sound. You are no longer in a vast, glittering war room with billion-dollar budgets, but alone in a dusty, cold bedroom with an overdraft the size of Nebraska. Despair.