Malum Umbra

Play Malum Umbra at length and there's a fair chance you'll draw one conclusion: this is a game that could do with a gun.

Not in terms of gameplay – the game's first-person setup has no weapons to speak of. Your only defence as you trawl its dark halls is a candle with a particularly short fuse.

No, Malum Umbra could do with a gun, purely because there's a fair chance that if you get lost in its maze-like levels you'll want to shoot yourself.

Its problems lie in the fact that it never really makes up its mind about what kind of game it is.

The first-person perspective and vicious enemies that wouldn't be amiss in a Tolkien novel hint at a shooter, and Malum Umbra feels like a shooter much of the time.

Taking out enemies involves waving your torch to fight them off. Doing so requires you to tap a pad on the right of the screen when facing an enemy, firing at them in the same way you would in a shooter.

Yet fighting off such monsters is just a small part of what Malum Umbra is about. Indeed, the main challenge in navigation.

Pitched as a search for light in a series of dark, dank mazes, the game forces you to scurry through corridors as quickly as possible in order to find the level's end, marked by a bright beam of light.

It's part of a larger quest to pick up the eight pieces of Vatra scattered in the darkness by the evil sorcerer Karro. Take all such bizarre names out of the equation, however, and Malum Umbra comes down to one, rather narrow, talent – the ability to tell one near identical tunnel apart from another.

At your disposal is some chalk, the theory being that if you mark your path you'll stop yourself wandering around in circles. Unfortunately, levels are so dark that even the most experienced adventurer is likely to get stuck more than once along the way.

It's at points such as these that it becomes entirely obvious just how barren Malum Umbra is creatively. It looks good enough: the underground caverns fly past at a smooth rate, and the music – though especially repetitive – is of a quality that suggests some love has gone into the game's production.

But there's nothing more to Malum Umbra than educated guesswork and risk-taking. Picking one corridor over another other purely because you went on a fruitless jaunt in the previous direction five minutes earlier is a common occurrence.

As if scurrying around a labyrinth weren't difficult enough, you're reset to square one should your candle burn out. Your torch's flame acts as nothing more than a clock without numbers or hands.

When you consider that the brief moments of action are so badly handled you actively avoid them – your first target is an especially small spider that can take you down purely because you can't see it - it's not long before you're questioning just what you're playing for in the first place.

Make no mistake: Malum Umbra itself is just as clueless. Despite its production values, Broken Column's venture into the dark ultimately gets lost along the way.