Ju-On: The Grudge

At a time when the Wii's Achilles heel is its lack of good quality third-party titles that aren't lightgun games, it's depressing to come across a new release that suffers from a total failure to harness any of the trump cards Nintendo's machine holds over its HD rivals.

Ju-On: The Grudge is based on the J-horror film and styles itself as a haunted house simulator – an interesting enough starting point for a game you'd think, but any potential is killed off quicker than a promiscuous teenage girl in a Friday the 13th sequel.

Playing as a series of characters, you find yourself armed with only a torch and tasked with wandering around a muddily realised, recycled vision of a decaying industrial hellhole for no good reason ("find your runaway dog!"). Condemned: Criminal Origins proved four years ago that, while these locations aren't exactly fun to visit, they can be darkly compulsive. But the lack of flair and attention to detail on show here fails to reanimate this particularly rotten corpse.

It's the controls and the mechanics of the game that are really fatal, though. Using your Wiimote as a torch isn't a bad idea, but pressing a button to move forward is an option that's rarely used for a reason and the camera controls are a constant source of irritation. The vast majority of the gameplay involves holding down the B button, trudging slowly through the miserable, dark environments in a search for keys and torch batteries that run out far too quickly. Occasionally and predictably a hand will claw at you from a dark recess or a ghost will leap out at you, requiring you to shake the Wiimote about in various ways until you escape. It's imprecise, frustrating, repetitive, lacking in genuine challenge and only barely qualifies as a game. And with no replay value whatsoever, a running time of around six hours reinforces the feeling that Ju-On is frightening for all the wrong reasons.

On a final note, it's a crying shame that time and effort have gone into localising Ju-On when Nintendo refuse to adapt Tecmo's fantastic Fatal Frame 4 for release in the west – a genuinely scary, beautifully executed game that most of the Wii's audience are unable to enjoy.