Right then. There's so much to say about this, and we've a lot to get through in just one page. Is Conspiracy bad? Yes. Is it worth buying at all? No. Does the lead character have a suitably stupid porno/action hero name like, say, 'Cole Justice'? Yes, yes he really does.

Even within the generic, thrown-together valu-pak first-person shooter genre, Conspiracy is floundering, substandard piffle. From the moment the game splutters to life, to the moment a scrolling, unskippable, tediously long 'obituary' screen flashes up every single time you die, it's horribly apparent.

You play Mr Justice, a man with a gun, a slightly different gun, a rocket launcher and a mission to unravel some sort of tiresome waffle about gun-running drug-selling terror merchants. This is done by you shooting and punching your way through exotic locales including Aztec ruins and Arctic tundras. We're guessing the 'conspiracy' runs to the heart of Big Government itself, and that the final level involves Cole Justice wasting Secret Service spooks in the corridors of the White House with an experimental alien weapon while the president tries to ready his secret Oval Office escape pod. That's what probably happens - it was difficult to play this without turning it off every five minutes to put on MotoGP 3 instead.

The missions we did play are the usual identikit material: steal this virus, plant these explosives, go into that warehouse and shoot those terrorists hiding behind crates. So it's a relief that Conspiracy's saving grace is Cole Justice's lethal bag of gadgets and trickery. No, wait - that's crap too! The sniper rifle is as effective as a pistol, and doesn't actually zoom, grenades have random blast areas and insane rubber-ball physics, equipment you don't really need anyway magically appears out of thin air, and when you run out of ammo you're treated to a bizarre fist-clenching animation that makes Cole look like a pig-man, as he punches bad guys running on 32K Spectrum-powered AI with his trotters. The scenery is interesting too, consisting of polygonal slabs of colour fixed to one another at jaunty angles (green for trees, grey for rocks).

We've been told to mention that this is a semi-budget title, though - so maybe it's not supposed to be any good. Is that any excuse? It's your call, but OXM recommends using your 30 notes as bottom-wiping paper instead. Next!

1. Well, it's cheap we suppose. But, then again, you could just go and buy something better from the Classics range, couldn't you?

1. Really dumb AI. Why bother putting bad guys in at all if all they're going to do is wander preset paths and walk into their own traps?
2. Really ugly design! Dig those crazy trees, dig those crazy rocks, and dig that crazy design. It's like it was drawn by Picasso.
3. The missions are unbelievably dumb. We've seen it all before. So... very... very... tired... Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.
4. The price! It suggests that in some way you're going to be getting a bargain. It's not a bargain - it's £29.99 too much.

So bad it traverses the so-bad-it's-funny part, and comes back right round to just being plain old bad again. Do not buy.