This one arrived without any useful instructions. Nothing new about that. But it looked simple enough, so I started level one and resolved to work out what was going on for myself. I quickly worked out which readout was my shield level. So far so good. Also, one bar seemed to go up whenever I fired my guns, so I decided that was the 'laser temperature' gauge. Good. I like laser temperature gauges. The last one, then, must be the energy bar. Fine. So I fly through a forest, shooting at some bad guys on speeder bikes. Just like 3D Deathchase on the Spectrum in 1982, only with fuzzier graphics and no directional control. Fine. I note, with some pleasure, that Argonaut have avoided the old problem with this kind of reads-the- scenery-in-off-the-CD game, whereby the only way of showing when you've killed an enemy is to clumsily superimpose an explosion over it until it goes off the screen. Here, the view flicks to a cut scene of the enemy dying (from a fairly big selection, so you don't see the same sequence too often) once you've shot him up sufficently, and while it's not perfect - obviously you get dumped back into the action at a totally different place from where you left - you don't really notice, since the scenery all looks pretty much the same anyway.

But my game keeps ending for no apparent reason, even when I'm sure I haven't been hit by anything. So, an experiment. I fly through the forest, using my shield when bombs come towards me, and continuously and deliberately shooting straight up into the sky without hitting anything, to see if it's maybe some kind of over-heated-laser-exploding-on-me scenario. I don't kill anything, but after a few minutes, I've finished the level anyway. Hm.

It turns out, of course, that I'd been accidentally shooting a bloke who was on my side, which, for some inexplicable reason, also caused me to get killed by the baddies. Fair enough. But to be able to complete the entire first stage, in a game with only four stages, by firing up into the sky and hoping for the best... well, you know.

So it's a fly-along-on-rails-shooting-at-stuff game, converted from the CD-i of all things, and it's rubbish. I'm sure you're surprised. But what shall we talk about until the end of the review? Politics? Football? Sex? The morality of selfishness? The rest of the game? To enter your choice, dial 0891, followed by... no. I suppose not.

The rest of the game is different, but the same. Instead of flying through a forest, you're flying through a mineshaft (with more scenery spooled off the CD, except - be still my heart - you can rotate it around, to very little practical effect, as you fly automatically through it. This, apparently, is a major technical breakthrough), or walking through some corridors. The two walking-through-corridors sections, to be fair, are a bit better - here, Alien Odyssey tries to be Fade To Black, giving you a smidgen of control over where you go, mixed with some wacky camera angles to make everything look more interesting, and a few puzzles to solve. It's much less dull than the flying-around stages, but nowhere near exciting enough to make up for their appalling dismalness, especially if you had to actually play through the flying bits to get to the corridor bits, instead of using the cheat after the first five hours like I did.

The plot, then? Hardly. It's the old one-big-happy-alien-family-divides-into-two- opposing-tribes-one-of-whom-are-nice-hippy-types-who-live-in-caves-while-the- other-ones-learn-all-about-science-and-technology-and-obviously-ruin-everything- and-try-to-kill-the-nice-hippy-aliens-while-they're-about-it routine again, making a strong comeback after a long absence, what with it not having been used since, er, Darker from Psygnosis, last month. I'm bloody sick of it. PROGRAMMERS OF THE WORLD - A MESSAGE: if technology and scientific progress are so sodding terrible, then why don't you bugger off and live in a treehouse and we'll get someone else to write games to play on our technologically-advanced, scientifically-designed home computers instead, alright? Do you think Marconi spent the rest of his life writing radio plays about how bleeding awful the radio was?

Personally, I quite like being able to go down the shops for a Pot Noodle and a packet of crisps when I'm hungry instead of having to spend three days hunting out in the rain before killing a sabre-toothed tiger with nothing but a bit of sharp rock tied to a stick with bird's entrails, but maybe I'm just weird. Then again, if technological advancement means we have to play rubbish like this, except that we can rotate our non-interactive backdrops around us while we go, then perhaps the treehouse isn't such a bad option. After you with the bird's entrails.

VERDICT: It smells like a wet dog on a hot day. But you'd probably guessed that before we started.