Stress Attack

The question of how to deal with stress sits unhappily alongside the other great 21st century plagues such as debt and obesity? A long soak in a brine-filled tank? A wrestle with a naked man twice your size? Or does the digital age need a digital solution? Could Stress Attack, in which a worker drone battles in hand to hand combat against wave after wave of mindless automata, provide a cure?

The premise for the game is simple enough: corporate boss loads up worker bee with too many deadlines. The pressure mounts on our hero's shoulders until he can take no more and explodes in a terrifying office tantrum.

Fortunately, goes the premise, middle management has a special place to send weak-willed workers. Stress Attack Park. A place our man can let his rage run free, whacking its robot population into kingdom come until his stress levels drop back to normal and he can return to data processing or whatever other thrill-a-minute job he occupies in the corporation's bowels.

It's easy enough to get cracking through the park, pulling off acrobatic punch and kick moves by combining both '5' and the directional keys in a range of ways, grabbing wooden crates and axes on the way to knock back even the most fearsome robots.

You'll run into a reasonable variety of opponents from the word go too: great lumbering tin giants that throw flaming metal buckets, right the way down to small yappy metal mantraps that clamp onto your arms and chomp with all their might.

Taking these guys out one after another should be a pleasure, so what is it that makes the whole experience such a dreadful chore?

Well, if the ultimate aim is stress relief then you should be knocking robots all over the park easily and quickly, dancing onto the next one with the balletic grace of Jackie Chan, smashing tin soldiers onto their spot-welded backsides. But that doesn't happen.

You hit them. It doesn't do much damage. They get up. They lumber over and attack you again, swarming round you like zombies. Except they're so very, very slow and the pace is so incredibly repetitive, that after the first couple of stages the game loses any trace of excitement and slinks off into the quagmire of boredom. Even the gradual addition of attacks that are more elaborate, combination punches and weaponry fails to kickstart much in the way of fun.

Perhaps if the backdrops, brightly coloured and stylised though they are, changed more often... Perhaps if there was more variety in the amount of hits it takes to knock out each robot, with some quick and easy kills available... Or if it was simpler to string together spectacular combinations of attacks, so that you had some satisfaction for your efforts... Perhaps, then, the game might have been more fun.

So if stress relief is what you're after there are plenty of other options. There's that brine-filled tank and the naked wrestling. Or better still, sit in a darkened room and zone into the Zen-like rhythms of Tetris. You could even take up golf.

Stress Attack, as the name suggests however, is something of a misnomer.