Title: CLUEDO CHRONICLES – FATAL ILLUSION
Genre: Adventure
Strap: Hasbro, in the developers' studio, with the computer game

Cluedo isn’t perhaps the most lively and entertaining of the board games decorating the shelves of your local toy shop. So to replicate it on a computer would be near pointless. Thank goodness Hasbro haven’t then. But instead they have made a rendered graphic adventure based on the license. Oh bollocks.

Perhaps you should have the games full title: Cluedo Chronicles – Fatal Illusion – Mystery Series: Episode One. Catchy huh? But it isn’t the length that should immediately raises the hackles on the back of a neck; it’s the presence of the words "Episode One". At the least, this is optimistic, at most, it is downright daft. Not only does it wreak of naïve pride, but it also bellows, "There’s more of this to come". And believe me, you don’t want any more. You don’t want this much either. None of it, in fact. Less than that. Pretend you never even heard of it. Turn the page. Now. Phew.

So now no one is reading, this will become like an average Friday night for me. A man on his own shouting about why things are rubbish and how life is just crappy, being ignored by the slightly scared looking people standing around him.

Perhaps I am being unfair on Cluedo, perhaps it doesn’t deserve to bare the brunt of such scorn that could be laid upon the genre of rendered adventures as a whole. But it’s too late now, so the job may as well be finished.

You glide around rendered scenes, talking endlessly to boring rendered characters with awful fake British accents about nothing of interest, trying to solve a murder that you end up wishing you had committed yourself in the first place. It is claimed that this game is for children. That is a pathetic defence, inevitably invented once the developers realised quite how bad their product was. "Say it’s for children, they’ll play anything". Except they won’t. Children are far more critical of games than anyone else, and they certainly have better things to do than sit through the tedious conversations this game is entirely comprised of.

Verdict: Yet another imagination-less adventure to put in the pile

Score: 31%

Tech Specs:
Publisher: Hasbro
Developer: Hasbro (in house)
Price: £20