Hired Team: Trial GOLD

It was bound to happen sooner or later. After the massive success of Unreal Tournament and Quake III, there were always going to be some below-average imitators. Although most developers have been intelligent enough to see that this particular market is far too competitive to hope to nudge the two giants off their perch at the moment, Russian developer New Media Generation has decided to have a go anyway.

The comparisons with Unreal Tournament are not redundant -this really is the most blatant attempt to cash in on Epic's success. The problem is that it doesn't use the Unreal engine, the weapons are crap and the AI isn't really up to much either. The look of Hired Team sticks closely to the medieval/industrial tone adopted by Unreal but is completely lacking in detail, textures or smoothness. Try playing Unreal without a 3D card to get a similar effect.

To make matters worse, the weapons make the ones in Nerf Blast Arena sound authentic. The term peashooter immediately springs to mind as soon as you start firing your pistol, and things don't get much better from there. The machine gun fires peas at a fast rate and the rocket launcher, a slightly larger variety of leguminous plant pods - a broad bean perhaps. It really is that pathetic. As for the characters in the game, they are an impressively thick bunch. It doesn't matter whether they're on your side or not, they never feel as though they're worth shooting. They skip, hop and jerk like puppets on a string around the dull levels. Apparently, the game has already sold more than a million copies in Germany. They obviously haven't heard that Unreal Tournament is out on budget. Fools.