Right. That's it. I've had just about enough. I've been trying to like this game for three days now, and it's finally defeated me. You win, Darker. You're crap.

But first, a small plot interlude. You are the Delphi, one of two races on a curious planet where one side is perpetually in daylight and the other is perpetually in darkness. The Halons are the guys from the light side, and they're thrusting, upwardly mobile, industrial types, gobbling up their resources in order to run their glue factories and neato skimmer cars. (You're getting ahead of me already, aren't you?) This has wreaked the predictable environmental havoc on the Halons' side of the planet, and now they're coming after your side, which is unfortunate as the Delphi are a bit of a hippy race, technologically backward and peaceful. (Odd how the clever scientific types never get to be the good guys, and how technology always seems to equate to war. It's almost as if... no, never mind.) Your engineers have hurriedly converted some old school bus-type shuttles into slightly wobbly fighters, and you rush off to do battle.

Now the plot, as it stands, is both hopelessly hackneyed (oh no, not the old pollution routine again) and full of holes (the Halons start attacking you using two or three tiny little fighter craft at a time, rather than an all-out steamrollering of your almost non-existent defences with giant solar-powered tanks, for example), but nonetheless it's the thing that's kept me plugging away at Darker for as long as I have. Your shuttle is so slow and rickety (fire too many shots in a row and the power drain causes you to fall out of the sky) that it's a struggle just keeping it in the air, and when you do manage to shoot down an enemy using your hopelessly sluggish unguided missiles, it feels like a real triumph. The city you're defending is nicely realised, with convincingly varied scenery and attention to detail, like the clock tower which chimes as you putter past. Your engineers are constantly striving to invent slightly better craft and weaponry, and the sense of urgency as you grimly try to hold on against the growing threat of the Halons comes across very effectively.

But atmosphere can only carry a game so far. Sooner or later it's got to come up with some gameplay, and this is where Darker comes hopelessly unstuck. All that you get to do (or all you get to do in the first three days, at least) is launch your ship (there's a nice detail here, too, whereby sometimes the unreliable launch trajectory causes you to crash straight into the ground unless you're really alert and lurch for the controls in time), fly around at random looking for some enemies (you're told they're "near the canoe factory" or whatever, but not where the flipping canoe factory actually is), shoot them down and fly back to base and start again. (If they shoot you down instead, it doesn't really matter as you've got unlimited lives.)

Now and again you get a new weapon (the first one, a guided missile, is immeasurably harder to hit things with than your ordinary rockets, because you have to guide it manually and any control movements you make for it apply to your ship as well. Duh!), and sometimes you meet a new kind of baddy (a mysterious Halon ship which seems to create some kind of energy field, inside which your engines sputter and die, causing you to flop gracelessly to the ground and explode), but basically you're just doing the same thing over and over against ever-increasing odds, and it gets very frustrating very quickly. Why? Here's why.

The Halons are armed with guided missiles, which are very difficult to avoid (sometimes you can do it by a combination of evasive manouvering and speed boosting, but sometimes nothing you do has any effect) and cause irreparable damage. (I'll take a moment to elaborate here, because it's relevant. You have a 'damage dial' with three dots in the middle. When you take hits, the damage dial fills up, and when it's completely red one of the three dots lights up and the dial resets. While you're flying around, the ship slowly repairs itself, but only the actual dial part is affected - once a dot is lit up, it's lit up for good, and once they're all lit one more good hit will kill you.

You can't return to base for repairs - they won't let you back in until you've completed a mission, quite happily watching you smash head-first into the hangar doors - and if you take a couple of hits early in a mission you might as well crash into the ground and start again.) At first the damage system makes for an exciting addition to the game, as bursts of dogfighting are interspersed with lulls as you fly off to recuperate, but as enemies become more numerous it rapidly becomes frustratingly and absurdly difficult. By the eighth mission or thereabouts, you're pitched against nine or ten enemies at once, all faster, more manouevrable and more heavily-armed than you, and it's all just a bit depressing. (There's small compensation to be found in the way that the Halon craft smoke and flame as damage increases, eventually nosediving into the ground if you don't completely blow them up, but it's purely cosmetic cheer.)

And that, surprisingly, all there is to it. Later on you can watch some tanks drive around, nick Halon ships and fly around underground tunnels (apparently), but the superhuman effort and patience required to get that far will be more than most players can manage.

VERDICT: Extremely thin and painfully slow, and those are the good bits. Atmospheric, but in the end just depressing.

35%

BEACONS OF HOPE

Your city is powered by a grid of Energy Beacons, marked by these towers. Whenever you fly near one, your ship's battery is partially recharged, lighting up the green meter at the bottom left-of-centre of your instrument panel. Each of the five green dots there (a dot lights when all the units of the meter above them are lit) allows you one speed boost, a very short burst of extra power which can help you to evade missiles, chase enemies, or get out of a potentially fatal stall. This is a great idea, and makes for much dramatic tension as you decide whether to chase after a damaged enemy or stay close to a Beacon to recharge your own power.