So Mace (that's you) sets off on his first job, and eventually uncovers a monstrous conspiracy involving parasitic aliens (the ghost-shrimp-squid-like "Watchers") and the huge Tannan Corporation.

From the start, and although the intro sequence isn't all that good (it uses the game engine and the characters aren't well modelled or lip-synched) Mace Griffin's story sucks you in, and the initial impressions are good. The graphics are mostly superb, both on solid ground or in space - because Mace's big selling point is that you can seamlessly go from shooting enemies in a hangar to jumping in your ship and taking off without so much as a loading screen…

   

Mace's FPS levels play a lot like Halo (although the 'jump' and 'reload' buttons have swapped position). You have a rechargeable shield and although you don't have a dedicated grenade trigger, most weapons have useful and more powerful secondary fire modes - you select weapons with the d-pad or the black and white buttons. The space flight sections are disappointingly basic shoot 'em ups after which you then land (often automatically). You usually (depending on the craft) get a selection of lasers and missiles or rockets with which to blast the enemy.

Back on the ground, most walls or floors have wonderful looking, bump-mapped textures that look like you could touch them, and in space the surfaces of some of the asteroids are simply amazing. The game even has gorgeous water (that you have to dive/swim into on more than one occasion). Mace Griffin's universe is never less than pleasing to the eye - and sometimes makes even Halo look plain. The game also has plenty of gore with bullet wounds producing spurts of blood (be it red, purple or green) and many explosive and energy weapons capable of splattering an enemy all over the walls - it's quite graphic but never gratuitous, and really adds something to the game in my opinion - it's unquestionably satisfying to decorate a room with an enemy's blood and guts by using a powerful weapon when they've hurt you badly or were outnumbering you and taunting you. Pleasingly (and unlike many games) MG lets you shoot through mesh walkway floors or fences and use stealth properly. Many shootouts (some as tense as Halo on "Legendary") await you, and there are a lot of impressively huge levels. The sniper rifle has an amazing telescopic zoom, and perhaps surprisingly some enemies can be taken out from so far away that you actually use it.

On the downside the link sequences often go on and although you can skip them, they often consist of several scenes which have to be skipped individually (a real pain if you're replaying a section for the fifth time) - which brings me to Mace's level of difficulty. It's not exactly too hard (although the final space battle and the one-hit-kill alien 'Watchers' might drive you nuts) but the game doesn't allow you to save just anywhere, and the restart points are often way too far apart (sometimes half an hour's tough play). Whilst Halo seemed to always let you progress a bit further (even on the toughest setting), Mace seems to want you to turn off and play something less taxing - this game was either tested by expert gamers who have no grasp of an average gamers' ability or level of toleration, or by idiots who were too dim or macho to tell the developers that "this is too tough to be fun".

   

The game also has several minor bugs and glitches that should have been picked up in testing; For a start you get sticky remote grenades that you can either use for precision timed explosions or as a proximity-triggered booby trap. Trouble is that the enemy AI is so sharp that they'll hardly ever go anywhere near one of your "traps" - and that's just AI gone mad. Next; the game will sometimes autosave your game in a position that makes completion of the subsequent section impossible! (Let me explain: there are levels with dreaded time limits, and you simply won't have enough left and will have to go back to the last save before the clock started ticking). Once we even mistakenly stepped back through a door onto a revolving cylinder, only to have the game autosave our position without warning as we fell to our death, with no possible escape (at least we think that's how the stupid bug came about). All we could do is quit out to the main menu, go back to the previous section and load and continue from there. You'll also see dead enemies not realise their terminal condition (and remain standing up), and even glitches where enemy snipers can shoot through solid walls and floors. And finally; one awful one when I was swimming and when I came to the surface the muffled bubbly underwater sound remained and I found that I could pass clean through the scenery, rounded off the disappointments for me, although I have heard of others so annoying that the reviewer simply gave up on the game (isn't this sort of thing what game testers are paid for??).

Even with its failings, its false impression of freedom and general lack of choices, I enjoyed Mace Griffin - it looks consistently great and if you're patient enough there's (by today's standards) a big-ish adventure in there (twelve-ish levels), - the unreasonable difficulty just makes it drag on longer than it need to. Also, the game's nature and levels make it a perfect co-operative or multiplayer game, but sadly you don't get either…