Heist

Why have you never heard of this game? Because it's rubbish, clearly. If Heist was a film it would be made for television and broadcast on a regional channel at 1,40am. It would also be preceded by a warning that it contains strong language from the outset. Of course, that doesn't make it a good game, it simply makes it a bad game in which you are regularly accused of having sexual intercourse with your mother.

So what's the big idea? With a story worthy of Renegade, you are sprung from a Nevada jail, transported to a backwater town and told to await further instructions. These come via a call to a local phone box, whereby the 'mysterious' Colonel explains that you have to get a crew together and do a number of jobs.

The seeds of an average idea are in place, and in some ways it's a criminal version of the 1998 hit Commandos, also employing a similar graphical style. However, unlike that game, Heist is designed in such a cack-handed fashion as to make it at best really annoying, at worst unplayable.

Initially bewildering, countless perusals of the manual reveal a painful interface via which you "case joints" before heisting them, a clumsy process that mainly involves looking at slow-moving progress bars. Gradually bigger and more lucrative jobs follow, taking you on a fascinating voyage through the American underworld. Except it's muck.