Eighties' trash turns up some nasty surprises

This is an absolute Crockett of crap. For a franchise drenched with such wonderfully cheesy nostalgia, it's a crying shame that somebody has picked up the licence for peanuts, and then produced a game with monkeys.

First of all, Miami Vice featured a crime-fighting duo, so why isn't there a two-player mode? Ah well, you pays your budget prices, you gets your budget gaming sometimes. As either Crockett or Tubbs, you spend the entire game shuffling through levels littered with sporadic bad guys who are so hideously hard to lock on to or kill that you will want to ram your fist through the TV. Whether you actually shoot a bad guy seems to depend entirely on random chance, as one minute a bullet will hit its target, the next you might just as well be making balloon animals. The bad guys themselves seem to be able to hit you at an atrociously annoying rate.

Objects used as shelter are, like the targeting, totally random. They either protect you or bullets go through them. The biggest challenge is actually getting behind the objects to shelter in the first place, such is the abysmal control system. You walk like a crab and shoot like a drunk. To compound the misery, every time you get killed (and this will be frequent), you're forced back to the beginning of a level to attempt it all over again. It's not too bad because the bad guys respawn in the same place only to shoot at you in the same order again, so if you've the patience you could trudge through a level by trial and error. But who the hell would want to?

This is a wasted licence and a blot on the gaming landscape. It's ill conceived, was rushed to shop shelves under a whisper and plays like the gaming equivalent of being continually booted in the face. Utterly, desperately, and thoroughly awful, this is to be avoided at all costs.

So bad it's insulting. The developers should be dragged into the street and covered in steaming horse shit. Atrocious.