Ambulance Express

There's something inherently depressing about Ambulance Express.

I'm not talking about the fact that it's yet another half-baked addition to an overly saturated genre, and nor am I reacting to the developer's nondescript design philosophy.

What makes my shoulders slump and my heart sink is the knowledge that I have inadvertently extended the suffering of countless virtual victims through my inability to get them to hospital on time.

It wouldn't be so bad if Ambulance Express had more than one mode. A version of the game where you picked up a series of injured parties and rushed them individually to the nearest emergency unit might be easier to stomach.

That way, even if you ran out of time after the first rescue, at least you'd have assisted in the physical rejuvenation of one poor soul.

Instead, the game offers up a single mission that you are destined to fail over and over again.

Even if you manage to complete it, the preceding death toll would be so astronomical that your final passenger would have to possess the cure to cancer to balance out the karmic scales.

Ambulance Express's garbled instructions are at least concise: "make ur way!!! its an Emergency". This involves navigating your ambulance over a distance of 8M (the unit could be miles, it could be metres, could be Mars bars - the game refuses to elaborate) up a vertically scrolling highway to reach your sterilised destination.

The challenge is to avoid obstacles and oncoming traffic by jumping between the road's four lanes, while maintaining your vehicle's health bar (or it could be your passenger's health bar - again, the game is frustratingly vague).

Your ambulance teleports between lanes in the style of archaic racer DONKEY.BAS, making it feel more like a Tetris block than an actual car.

Which wouldn't be a problem, if Ambulance Express had any of the lasting appeal and infinite replayability of the puzzle classic.

Instead, we are presented with a poorly drawn, numbingly repetitive crawl of a game that frustrates without reward, and loops the same four seconds of music over and over, until you start to wonder whether you might need an ambulance yourself.