Many great ideas have followed from the marriage of two seemingly disparate things - a toothpaste that cleans as it whitens, alarm clocks that brew up a cuppa. You get the idea. And often, the coupling works.

But for every successful cross-pollination there are several hideous mutants confined to distant memory, never to be mentioned again - like the vacuum cleaner that fires bullets. See, you'd forgotten about that one.

Dark Summit is likely to go the way of the Hoover 9mm. A snowboarding game boasting something extra, it's supposedly a genre-busting story-based title with a plot. There's a sinister mystery on Mt Garrick, and to get to the bottom of it all you'll have to work your way to the top of the mountain. The storyline unravels in cut-scenes shown after you complete slope-based challenges, earning respect and points that unlock prohibited areas further up the mountain.

When welding together two separate concepts, each one needs to stand on its own two feet before bringing the pair together. Unfortunately, Dark Summit ends up as a trashy video game held together by the misguided hope that the whole will somehow, magically, be more than the sum of its two lacklustre parts.

Even though its not a stand-alone snowboarding game, the very least you'd expect from a game set entirely on slopes is a decent control system and physics. Both are absent.

Genre-busting or not, it's useless staging a game on snowed-up hills that are as authentic as Kelvin Klein underpants - they don't look or feel the slightest bit genuine. Tricks lack any momentum, and feel way too disjointed and cardboard to contain any enjoyment.

But this isn't an extreme sports sim; it's about boarding plus the solving of a spooky mystery. But as that element is a sub-Scooby-Doo detective adventure that you'll crack in no time, the overall package is made doubly weak. Ambitious on two very different levels, Dark Summit fails on both.

1. Passable for ten minutes

1. Unrewarding gameplay
2. Devoid of originality
3. Abominable snow, man!

Power
Graphics do a job, but there's no flair. A very weak application of the potential grunt of Xbox.

Style
Derivative and lacking imagination. The dayglo-coloured nuclear gunk, for example, just looks silly.

Immersion
There's more escapism in a packet of crisps. No reason to lose yourself here.

Lifespan
Terminal. Even if you do knuckle down through the 45 challenges, it's not gonna last.

Summary
A poorly stitched Frankenstein of half-hearted gameplay, fleshed out with a pointless storybook aspect.