Prison Break: The Conspiracy

These Are Lovely bricks. In fact Prison Break probably has the best in-game brickwork I've seen. If you can find a better brick in another game, you can take a real brick and cave my skull in with it. Through the wonders of parallax mapping (and they are wonders), you'll feel you can almost reach out and touch each individual brick, run your fingertips along its coarse, rough-hewn surface. They're great bricks. Brillo bricks.

Everything else is a bit rubbish. In Prison Break: The Conspiracy you play Tom Paxton, a retroactively invented character who's been slipped into (or rather in between) events of the first season of the TV show. As such, you can have no effect or involvement in the show's main plot. You're constantly confined to the periphery of the main character's - Michael Scofield's - vision, hovering about in the background, peeking out at him from around corners and sliding out from under his bed while he sleeps. Don't let the TV cameras catch you, otherwise you'll create a universe-searing paradox.

Paxton's plot-dodging adventures lead him along a series of linear levels, each one set in and around the prison, and task him with retrieving a string of objects. Computer records, ID cards, medicine, sharp things, that sort of stuff. The stealth system can be summarised like this: press Q to hug corners, then jump when an NPC looks the other way. When you're not doing that, you're fighting, a system which can also be summarised with damning little effort: left-click for a weak attack, right-click fora strong attack, and Shift to block.

Prison Bore

Even getting caught is a fun-less chore, as the action freezes and the camera slowly pans to the austere, boggle-eyed face of the guard who spotted you, before lobbing you back to the last checkpoint. Quick-time events break up the action in much the same way as sonorous flatulence punctuates a big poo, while mini-games like weight-lifting and underground fighting offer a meaningless and repetitive keyhammering distraction.

The real actors are used, if you were wondering, but clearly some of them are more in demand than others. Scofield's lines total five, maybe six sentences. Mob boss Abruzzi does most of the talking here, but he's hardly tier-one Prison Break cast. Disappointing all round. One for the brick fans only, I'm afraid.