Tour de France 2011

Let's start with a joke.

Q: When is a game not a game?
A: When it's not a game.

Pretty funny, right? Also, staggeringly apt, because despite what it might try and tell you, Tour de France 2011 is not a game.

You see, the term 'game' suggests a number of things. Firstly, a level of interactivity: at some point in a game, you actually have to do something. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, a game has to be fun. Only a masochist is going to sit through a title that they're not enjoying.

Unfortunately, these elements, these very foundations of a game seem to have been neglected in the creation of Extra Live's official Tour de France 2011 tie-in.

The 'game' (for want of a better term) is a kinda management simulation that lets you take control of one of the teams which competed in this year's prestigious cycling event.

Once you've selected your group of riders, you guide them through the hills, mountains, and flat bits of all 21 stages. Actually, 'guide' is too strong a term. 'Watch' is probably more accurate.

Before each stage begins, you can set goals for the five riders in your team. These range from winning the stage outright, to taking control of the various coloured jerseys that denote the best sprinter or mountain climber.

On the same screen, you can refill the energy bars of each of your furious pedallers, or take energy away from them to give to their teammates.

When your team is fit to burst with energy and knows exactly what it has to achieve in the race, you send it out riding. Here, you get to control your guys' speed boosts and their position on the road.

And, towards the end of the stage, you get to tap rapidly on the screen to see how well they do in the sprint finish.

The problem is, you're never really doing anything. You'll push the button to make one of your riders go faster every now and then, but that's it. You're just sitting watching scenery.

That wouldn't be so bad if the game got its micro-management sections right, but they're actually non-existent. There's no tinkering with your bikes or changing the diet and training routines of your riders. There's just tap to go faster, tap to go slower.

Tour de France 2011 also gets its difficulty settings all wrong. In spite of the reams of statistics thrown in front of you when you choose your team, they all play out exactly the same way.

This means, it's perfectly possible during your first playthrough to win all of the coloured jerseys and take all of the positions on the podium.

You'll spend most of Tour de France 2011 watching a badly animated group of cyclists sliding through a terrible representation of the French countryside. It's hypnotic, like a screensaver, but it's not much fun. And it's not a game.