In spite of all the flaws that stare you in the face after an hour or two of playing Enter The Matrix, the one criticism you can't level at it is that it was rushed. Having being worked on in some form or other pretty much since the first film came out, you can only conclude that this is the game that the developers wanted to produce.

And certainly, it's hard to argue that much expense has been spared on the multimedia front. There's over an hour of fresh new Matrix footage, a script overseen by the Wachowski Brothers, and a few other factors that sparkle when printed on the back of the box. It did raise a chuckle, mind, that we were offered the chance to 'Save Your Progress' when all we'd done was watch a bit of video and pick which of the two characters - Ghost or Niobe - we wanted to play as.

The action splits into a few disciplines. There's fighting, driving and a hovercraft piece as well, and each requires differing skills and slightly differing controls. The game introduces a learning curve by throwing up tips as and when it thinks you need them, but this tends to be a little clunky and at times patronisingly basic. That said, it's not particularly tricky to get to grips with what you need to do.

The fighting side is probably the most fun. Assuming a keyboard/mouse combination more traditionally associated with first person shooters, here the mouse is used to execute fighting moves. It's quite a simple system, and that means that it's enjoyable in the early stages, but lacks sophistication and veers towards repetition as things move on.

The game does have one big trick it can throw at you though, with the infamous bullet time option. Sadly, Max Payne did this better than Enter The Matrix a couple of years back. But that's not to say it's not fun. To implement it, you need to wait until your Focus Meter is at a high enough level, and then it's a click of a button to slow the action right down and give you a temporary but welcome unfair advantage.

Despite its flaws, it'd be wrong to write the action section of the game down as poor. It isn't. It's just a lot less adventurous than we were expecting, but still quite good in its own right. It's the rest of the game that really lets the side down. The driving section in particularly is both frustrating and hard to control, especially as your main focus tends to be on shooting down other road users. And you can't ever lose that feeling that everything you're play has been done better (much better, in some cases) elsewhere, and that without the Matrix licence attached, it'd be nothing more than a middle-of-the-road shelf-filler.

Still, that Matrix card is played well. You have to respect the fact that a whole new side story has been created and executed here, and one that weaves well into The Matrix universe. Sadly, that means that for fans, the main reason for shelling out for this will be to see the extra footage. They won't be disappointed with that, but they may well be disappointed with the game.

It'll do. At best, this is a mildly diverting game that just happens to be married to one of the biggest movie licences in recent years.