Totally Spies

Despite what movies, cartoons and books might have us believe, teenagers aren't really cut out for top-secret espionage work. Granted, they might have the technical nous – anyone who can work a mobile phone while applying lipstick or playing football's clearly got the skill and coordination – but we feel they lack the necessary focus.

For instance, the three female protagonists in Totally Spies are far more concerned about their clothes, the state of their standing in the classroom social scene and whether or not you can beat up an ancient Egyptian mummy without actually touching it or not.

Still, someone obviously thinks that they've got what it takes to get the job done because they've been assigned to capture a criminal who's stolen a powerful Egyptian amulet that bestows unimaginable power upon its owner. Which explains why an English Lit class is interrupted by an urgent trip to the Middle East in order to retrieve it.

What follows is your standard side-scrolling platform affair, with you strolling left and right along the various paths and platforms with which you're faced. Jumping and acrobatic flips can be achieved with a single press upwards, while hitting '5' or the action button puts those self-defence classes that daddy paid for to work.

So far, so ordinary.

Of course, usually at this point you'd expect the grand reveal, some wonderfully innovative, unusually entertaining feature of the game to crop up and make you think how we're all a bunch of sly old dogs here at Pocket Gamer for not mentioning it sooner.

Except that in the case of Totally Spies there really is nothing more to say.

It's just an extraordinarily average platform game. There's nothing outstanding about it whatsoever. And while that doesn't make it a bad game, it's hard to think of any reason why you'd buy it over any one of the dozens of far more interesting and intriguing platform games already on the market.

Take the visuals, for instance; while they're bright and tie in nicely with the look of the cartoon series on which the game's based, they're rather bland in terms of detail and don't make you identify with any one of the three main characters. Which renders the fact that you've got to choose which of the three Totally Spies girls to play as at the beginning moot.

The controls are responsive, if inflexible. This is one of those platform games where it's more a case of pressing the correct button at the right time, as by breaking the carefully-timed order of commands you'll upset the space-time continuum. There's so little room for exploration and making your own way through each level that you might as well be on rails for all the freedom you have.

What this takes away in terms of free will, it replaces with scripted set-pieces that catapult you up series of spring-like rugs, down mountainous slopes on a giant snowball or escaping from giant robotic spiders in space.

Whether you view this as a reasonable trade-off or not will come down to personal taste; for our part, we like a little more interaction with our games, but if you like being taken on the equivalent of a roller-coaster ride, it'll suit you down to the ground.

But even then, there are games out there that do a better job of that, too. Rayman Raving Rabbids is one such platformer where you spend tracts of each level with minimal control over the protagonist. And if you're of the opposite opinion, Sonic The Hedgehog is still unrivalled.

See, it always comes down to focus. Some have it, others don't. Totally Spies needs to sit quietly and think about what it's trying to achieve.