Now without wanting to colour this review from the start, unlike a lot of people, we thought that Blinx the Timesweeper was one of the most boring, tedious, sluggish, badly thought out and implemented games in the Xbox’s lineup. We had big hopes for the sequel then! – In fact we were surprised they even bothered…

Blinx 2 goes down the same road as the original but takes a few more interesting turns along the way – unfortunately it still hits the same obstacles as its predecessor – head-on sadly. This time you don’t play as Blinx (the fat ginger cat “hero” from the first game) himself, but are allowed to create your own cutesy biped pussy character and decide what it looks like, what it wears and what its gang of three helpers looks like too. You get trained to use new abilities at the base, or can do challenge tests to earn new items and characters after each level. The tutorial is handy at first and means you don’t need the manual, the trouble is, it never stops telling you what to do, and in the end the way the message windows pop up incessantly borders on the comical – at least it would be comical if it wasn’t so darned annoying.

So, off you go to recover the shards of a really important crystal which is really powerful and… yeah right - like you care about the “plot” – basically you get to trudge, hop, skip and jump around a selection of platform-infested levels trying to find stuff for your “controller” pussycat, whilst using time control icons that you pick up when you kill time monsters (bear with me), that mean you can realign events, slow things down or even rewind time and eventually fight a boss creature at the end. How original. How ground breaking.

The Rewind function means that everything close to you but excepting you returns to how it was a few seconds earlier, the Fast Forward means you move faster but everything else stays slowed down, Record allows you to record yourself performing an event, which is then played back (so you can perform actions that require you to do two things simultaneously), Pause makes everything stop except you, and Slow slows everything except you. I expect you can imagine the possibilities for puzzling that all these features offer, and you have to use them all at some point to get through the lengthy levels. And here comes the first problem, Blinx 2 has lots of restart points set throughout the levels and an autosave feature, but your progress is only saved right at the end of a level when you return to Pussy HQ (The Time Factory). Now the levels can be quite big, and vary hugely in difficulty and levels of frustration, but nearly all feature old-school platforming sections that mean you clamber around the level trying to get higher all the time, and can often fall all the way back to the bottom and have to start again.

Now whilst fellow-time-fiddling game, Prince of Persia, would have allowed you rewind from the death caused by your mis-timed or badly-judged jump, try again and progress, Blinx 2 only lets you manipulate time when Blinx sodding 2 thinks you should, so there’s very little in the way of actual dynamic time control. So although I plodded and battled my way all the way through the game, I can see many people losing patience with its repetitious gameplay, uneven difficulty and annoyance level – trust us, if you’ve ever thrown a joypad in frustration, save yourself some money and steer well clear of Blinx 2. You have to make sure you’ve actually finished a level before turning off – checkpoints are NOT save points, and you’re unlikely to want to play through any of these levels twice, believe me...

One of B2’s best features is that fact that, after playing as the goody-goody Timesweeper cats for a while, you get to control the enemy Tom Tom Gang pigs. PIGS? I hear you say, well yeah PIGS, pigs that walk on two legs like the Timesweeping cats and dress in Hells-Angel type gear (no, really)… Please Lord, let this review be over soon. Anyway, it’s nice to see the battle from the other side, and the Tom Toms tend to use a bit of stealth (Solid Squeak?) and high tech gadgets to defeat the Timesweepers, although you can shoot your way out of trouble too.

Both sets of adversaries can spend gold on upgrades, new equipment, new team members or even sunglasses or earrings (I kid you not) when they return to their bases at the end of levels, or view “movies” in the “Theater”. Now, curious as heck (I was a cat, remember?) to see what exactly the “”Movies” were, I went and had a look when I’d unlocked a few, and it turns out that they are in fact HILARIOUS (not) “out-takes” from the making of the game’s cut scenes. I seriously doubt they’d make a village idiot chuckle. Oh dear.

Blinx’s failings are a real shame because even though they may be a bit fiddly at times to use (and less logical than Prince of Persia’s) the time features are still pretty cool, and the co-op idea is great for a platformer - how good could the likes of Jak 3 or Sly Raccoon have been with a split screen mode? But, the game is far too tricky and annoying for what I imagine its target audience to be, and the upright-walking cats and pigs might just be the worst platform game protagonists ever. In spot-tests around here these bizarre characterisations don’t seem to appeal to anyone, least of all me - the cats aren't agile or graceful and the pigs aern't cute or funny. Blinx 2 is a clever and occasionally fun game that just has too many annoying flaws to take it into consideration when looking for your next game, and whilst the Xbox isn’t exactly awash with quality platformers, surely they can do better than this.