Elite Forces: WWII - Normandy

When you're working with the fastest moving peacetime technology ever created, there are bound to be a few stragglers who can't keep up with the pack, if this were, say, the ballpoint pen industry, being 15 years off the pace might not be such a tragedy, but in the world of computer games it's like turning up to work clad in a leopard-skin loincloth, caked from head to toe in your own filth, and proceeding to dry-hump the work experience girl before cleaving her skull with a rough-hewn adze. Such is the nature of WWII: Normandy, an absolute corker of an FPS that Richie was kind enough to bring us back from the US.

Listing all the crimes of this catastrophic WWII shooter is beyond the scope of this publication, but needless to say, if ever compiled they would run to several weighty volumes. Towards the top of the list, however, would have to be the wretched visuals, the laughably trite game mechanics and the unforgivable graphical glitches.

Maybe if the developers had been a bit more forthcoming, and splashed the words "it's really not very good" on the packaging, we might have been slightly more lenient. But since the words "advanced enemy Al" appear instead, we're forced to take a stand. The enemies are in fact the most intellectually bereft cast of goons this side of a Britney Spears chatroom, though with a lemming-like intuition, the game does have sufficient self-awareness to crash frequently, saving anyone from further misery had they wandered into it thinking it was a retro re-release of 3D Monster Maze.

Richie has already bought one copy of this rubbish; don't set a dangerous precedent for the industry by doing the same.