Wild Wild West: The Steel Assassin

Will Smith doesn't have any luck in games. Look at Men In Black, a brilliant film turned into the dullest piece of action/adventuring this side of Orion's Belt. So what chance does a turkey like Wild Wild West stand of making a decent translation into the digitised world of computer games? None, of course.

Continuing the story where the film left off, you go around shooting cowboys and solving puzzles, but it's about as wild as a disco night down the old folks' home. You play the Will Smith character in some levels (the prince of cool is made to wobble around like a puppet with weak knees) and Kevin Kline in others. In the first set of missions the emphasis is on action, which just means you point your mouse at cardboardy figures hiding behind trees until the target shrinks for you to shoot accurately, while the second concentrates on puzzles, which are so simple they hardly deserve their name.

Since the film flopped both artistically and at the box-office and its street-cred is at gutter level, making a game aimed at impressionable children was a good idea. Shame that it was the last one developer South Peak Interactive had. We're sick'to death at the way publishers keeps spilling the guts of adventure games on to the market as if they needn't make the effort any more. Someone had better revive the genre or they might as well bury it 6ft under.