Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, whether you are human, animal, vegetable or mineral I have something important to say, something you all must know. Something that can save the plight of humanity from disappearing  into a black hole of despair and utter damnation.

This is the kind of advice that if you are a parent you should pass on to your children, it’s the kind of advice that as a teacher you should teach in schools, colleges, the workplace to those who don’t know, and this is the kind of advice and sane rational reasoning that could save you, the reader of this review a whole lot of pain, heartache and misery. Believe me, these words should be taken with more than a pinch of salt, they probably should be taken with a punch of salt with fists the size of Chuck Norris’s manliness as I cannot stress this point any more if I scream it from the rooftops loudly, through a megaphone, on the hour every hour.

Are you ready for this, because really, you need to hear it.....

Now, I shall begin.

There is a game on the market at the moment. I call it a game, it’s really more of a festering silicone disc of foul soul sapping hideousness. It’s a broken lament to all that is wrong in the world. It is a nasty pile of excrement the world has never seen the likes of before. No, it’s not a sequel to that horrible Terminator game from last year, it’s the new “effort” from Sega. The espionage role player known as Alpha Protocol.

Now don’t get me wrong, the whole idea of an espionage role player sounds awesome, it could be implemented so well, I mean, who in their right or even their wrongest of minds could deny that James Bond style shenanigans with guns gadgets and levelling up would be fun. Imagine Final Fantasy or WoW tailored to spying, espionage and counter intelligence. On paper it would be great, in your head it would be better, but  in practise it’s like visiting the lavatory only to find a seat made of razor blades and that you’ve suddenly come down with the worst case of diorrhea  and haemorrhoids combined the world has ever seen, and you really, really need to poop. Then you might be half way there.

So, what is wrong with this game? Fundamentally nothing and everything all  at once. The concept is great, the ideas are great, there are puzzles, there’s gun action, you can fight, blow things up, kick the crap out of badguys and save the world in time for beer. But unfortunately the fun stops there. At the blurb on the back of the games packaging.

For a start the game is full of wholly unlikeable characters. The lead character, Michael Thorton is an ass, a rampaging buffoon of ridiculous proportion. Deeply unlikeable and the oh so generic dark brooding bad boy with a real sense of duty is rolled out for what seems the billionth time with other hackneyed characters and horribly stereotypical action flick roles, there’s the Morgan Freeman-alike who tries so hard to be like Samuel L Jackson he’s more like Bill Cosby on rohypnol. There’s the foxy redhead weapons expert who you know fancies the lead character and wants to do dirty things to him yet pretends to hate him while another surfer type brain dead dude is interested and jealous of the lead character from the get go, and then there’s the grumpy older guy who doesn’t get along with you at first but will grow to like you as the game goes on, and of course everybody will live happily ever after once the threat has gone and there’s sure to be a bad guy in a base in a volcano somewhere punching his desk growling “Next time........” when he inevitably fails his mission of evil.

If that’s not enough of a warning then there’s the gameplay. In two words it’s “bloody awful” there’s AI in the game that seems to have eaten all it’s crayons and lost it’s helmet. There’s the ridiculous phenomenon where you can shoot someone in the back of the head from a millimetre away yet they live, but you shoot them in the foot from around a corner and they die a horrible death. There are bad guys who stand next to you oblivious to the fact that you’re killing their mates with the huge gatling gun they’re ignoring, and on the offchance one of them do notice you, they take you down with an RPG, standing next to you causing a bigger explosion than all of the explosions in the Die Hard films combined, while they stand there unscathed. And this seems to be an ongoing theme for the game. In short, it’s painful to play.

I mentioned the characters in the game, and interacting with them is horrible. It's never nice talking to the unlikeable, but in this case not only is it tedious and so poorly acted it could make even Steven Segal weep, but the conversation system seems lifted straight from the far superior Mass Effect games and destroyed mercilessly. It's the kind of thing that if I had my way would be classed as torture and used only in the kind of situations that electrodes to the genitals is considered kind.

There are some interesting ideas for puzzles, yes they’re the usual bomb or alarm disarming fayre you’d expect with cutting wires in the right order while racing against the clock or rewiring them via certain colour coded points and it pains me to say these are pretty cool, but a game they do not make and seem very throwaway and wasted when put next to the shower of *expletive deleted* that the rest of the game offers. Unfortunately even these good points are marred by the ever nasty AI and badguys appear from nowhere in the most implausible of ways ruining the hard work you’ve just done and of course ruining the highlight of the game which probably should have been merely a minigame.

And to be quite honest that’s your lot. This game offers nothing but misery, dejection and the whole idea that staying in bed watching daytime TV  is preferable to the oh so exciting world of international espionage. There was only one thing that made me smile, and that was on the loading screen it chimes the age old  “Segaaaaaa” sound Megadrive/Genesis gamers know and love from those simpler days of the 1990s.

In short, there are two options, you could  buy this game or punch yourself in the trouser organs repeatedly on the hour every hour, I think the latter is more preferable. Seriously, don’t bother. It really is one of those games that would even make the most hardcore of agoraphobic gamers think the outside world is far more worth the risk.

Playing this game was like being given a new puppy for Christmas only to find it's severed head on my pillow on Boxing Day. It could have been so much more but just ended up being a cheap James Bond clone with a few elements of Mass Effect thrown in badly. It seems criminal with so many AAA titles out there right now, and no matter how much in short supply the amazing Red Dead Redemption is, this is by no means a suitable alternative for while you wait.