We’re good at telling when there’s trouble brewing; it’s the kind of sixth sense that we’re proud of. Maybe it’s the way that despite constant badgering on our part to Ubisoft’s various PR types, we didn’t even get a sniff of Over G Fighters until pretty much the day it was due on the shelves. It could have been the fact that on Ubisoft’s press site, a resource usually packed full of screenshots, movies and other useful information about its products, there’s absolutely nothing on the game apart from a release date. Or it might have been that as we wandered around the X360 offices trying to find someone up for reviewing the damn thing, we couldn’t find a single taker – something that comes as a shock, considering that the scrabble for freelance is usually like vultures ripping apart a bloody deer carcass. Whatever it was, we were certain something was up with Over G Fighters.

You see, the big problem with the Xbox 360 lies in the Achievement system – namely, the way that from the second you put a disc in your machine, your Achievements List brands you as having played the game whether you like it or not, with no way of removing it. We’ve got plenty of examples on there that we wish we could erase from our memories: our piddling two Achievements on Perfect Dark Zero before we got angry and threw it away; our single completion of Dead Or Alive 4 that caused us to take it back to the shop; the absolute zero we’ve scored for Rumble Roses XX because we just can’t be bothered. And now we’ve got Over G – a blight on our Achievement reputation that we just can’t shift, meaning we either add yet another black spot to our already lengthy list of disappointments or play an awful game endlessly to try and scrape every point from it.

And it is awful, believe us. Strangely though, it’s not in the ‘good lord, look at this absolute mess of a game’ sense, because it’s quite playable if you’re the kind of person who considers rusty bread knives and delicate parts of the anatomy to be a fun combination. No, it’s the fact that Taito appears to have taken a concept that is perfectly capable of delivering an awesome experience and then drained every ounce of fun out of it until all that’s left is a hollow husk full of annoyance, bad AI and even worse voice acting. Oh, and rubbish attempts at next-gen visuals.

We know full well that flying games like Over G can be fun because at exactly the same time that we were playing it, the team of our sister PlayStation2 magazine were enjoying the new Ace Combat game which is fast, frantic and packed with action. Against it, Over G looks like a tired octogenarian whose favourite pastime is banging on the ceiling with his walking stick and complaining about the noise. Sure, it all looks fairly competent when things start out – the menu system is fairly well organised and there’s a good range of choices available such as Scenario mode (the bulk of the game), Challenge (pitting your skills against a range of pilots), as well as over 30 planes and 75 missions to play around with. Unfortunately, that’s where the fun ends because the game itself is… well, arse.

It’s not just that it looks rubbish, although that’s a big problem straight off; for a next-gen game, it’s quite ugly and the fact that the new Ace Combat on the PS2 trumps it is almost embarrassing. However, it’s more the complete lack of speed – even when you’re supposedly using your afterburners and hurtling through the skies at over nine Gs – and excitement that ruins the whole experience, as well as the issue of Over G not really knowing what it wants to be. Is it a flight simulation with perfect controls and intricate detail, or an arcade shooter where dodging through the skies and firing endless streams of missiles is the order of the day? Apparently, not even Taito could decide because the game hovers between the two with some parts being too technical for their own good and others being far too simplistic.

That there are countless flaws we could highlight – the on-screen layout that changes without warning or reason, the rubbish AI, the diabolical vocal talent and weapons that decide whether or not to lock on for you, leaving you at the mercy of the game to grant you victory or failure – leaves us struggling to comprehend why this game came out in the first place. We’re even more bemused that enough of you bought it to put it in the Top 20 All-Format chart in July. If that’s not a sign of the world being a bad place to live in, we don’t know what is.