When I first heard about Armed and Dangerous I was excited. Coming from the same bloodline as Giants: Citizen Kabuto and MDK I was expecting an epic game with strong back story, plenty of humour and some varied gameplay set in massive picturesque landscapes. Well, you sort of get the landscapes in A&D, but the humour and variation is sadly missing…

The story (such as it is) sees you taking a band of gun-toting rebels called the Lionhearts (a 'dodgy geezer' Londoner called Rome, an eliminator droid called Q1-11 (who happens to be addicted to tea) and a Scottish Mole Miner called Jonesy). Completing the strange gang is Rexus, a seer and sage who suffered a tragic bang on the head that reduced him to the smelly, slightly disgusting and pitiful wreck of the man he is today. He still possesses some incredible powers though, and is an important key to the Lionhearts' success. You can order Q and Jonesy around by pointing and pressing the white button (black orders them back to fight in 'formation'), but this isn't exactly Desert Storm or Brute Force when it comes to a squad tactics.

   

One of the biggest aspects of Armed and Dangerous is its zany humour - occasionally it made me laugh out loud but the problem is that, like the school clown, it seems to lack real comic talent and it doesn't know when to stop, in order to give you a rest and make the next 'funny bit' actually funny. There are far too many badly timed slapstick and violent (I would say 'Monty Pythonesque' but it would be far too much of a compliment) visual jokes to be constantly amusing - you'll end up groaning and wondering about the age of the script writer.

Fighting your way across five diverse landscapes to complete 21 missions and sub-tasks (one of the first of which is to rescue Rexus), you get to use some of the most fun and imaginative weapons yet seen in a game; from your standard rifle, machine gun and sniper rifle you'll also get to use the Vindaloo Rocket Launcher, or the Topsy-Turvy bomb and the Shark Gun (it launches real land sharks that seek out and gobble up the enemy from below ground). The trouble is, as with A&D's humour that you use them so often that they soon lose their impact and appeal. The blurb accompanying A&D says: Armed & Dangerous - guaranteeing players a victory in 12,000 bullets or less! - It'll feel like you've used a lot more than that, believe me it will. There are fixed guns dotted around the scenery too, and they can obviously be turned on their owners with pleasing results, but they also often seem to be stupidly placed with annoyingly limited fields of fire.

Once you've cleared the mostly pretty and interesting levels of the countless enemies (annoyingly many of them respawn out of thin air when your back is turned) you can explore them 'til your heart's content, but you won't find anything of interest as other than being able to flatten most buildings and trees, there's little or no interaction with the environments (other than entering the same pub over and over again to save your game - presumably all the pubs are the same in the world of Milola, just like bloody Wetherspoons).

   

You get environments including icy and snowy regions, mountains with lovely views, deep and foreboding woods with beautiful sunshine, and rain-spattered cliffs, but not far beyond the pretty scenery are some ugly flat textured skies that completely spoil the overall effect. You battle enemies like half-man, half-animal Grunts, eliminator droids, huge Goliath mechs, evil monks… but you just use the same run in, shoot and try not to die approach all the time - now and then you'll even unlock extras including tougher difficulty levels, but quite why anyone would want to replay this game once completed is beyond me - it's plenty frustrating enough on its medium setting. A turbo-jump jet pack add some variety to a few levels but no sooner have you started to enjoy this than that disappears from the game. Every now and then you'll also get to control semi fixed cannon in a sub-level in which you have to fight off hordes of invaders, a lot of fun in a retro kind of way.

On the plus side, A&D is the perfect outlet for your frustrations, barring a few simple search type puzzles it's pure non-stop no-brainer shooty-blasting action. On the downside it's an occasionally painfully unfunny and disappointing game. Levels end abruptly and without any clear goals, and the mission statistics screen looks embarrassingly tacked-on. A fun game initially, things soon become a repetitive chore with an ever growing frustration level. A co-operative mode would have helped, but no such luck - and that's a really strange thing to be missing from (what at least pretends to be) a squad-based game these days. The promise of downloadable levels will only prolong the pain because although perfect for a quick blast, sadly I don't think Armed and Dangerous is a game you're going to want to play for long.