A modest hit when it made its full debut on console platforms last year, Club Football is one of the few games now that bothers to even attempt to crack the monopoly held by FIFA and Pro Evolution Soccer. After all, in the action footie game genre, FIFA has for a long time held the multimedia cards, and PES has constantly won the playability face-offs.

Yet Club Football has a gimmick. And it's the fact that the game is available in many different flavours, depending on your team. Thus, you can buy Arsenal Club Football, and the game comes laden with official Arsenal-ness, and when you take on the inevitable season mode, it'd be Arsenal you control.

For the 2005 version, Codemasters has opted to produce a PC version too, which is on test here. What the company hasn't done, however, is bring across the full range of Club versions. So on the PC the only UK clubs you can plump for are Arsenal, Manchester United or Liverpool, contrasting with a far more generous list on consoles. However, when you've played the game for a couple of hours, you'll appreciate that isn't much of a loss.

The reason? Because Club Football, sadly, just doesn't hang together very well when it gets to the pitch. The razzmatazz, the range of options up to that point and the friendliness of the interface lead you to hope otherwise, but a happy ending there isn't. It's not even that the game itself it bad - it's not. It's just completely middle of the road, with nothing in there - not even the much-vaunted in-close precision trigger control method - that would tempt you to surrender allegiance from your current footie game of choice.

Let's give you some examples of why it doesn't really work. Our opening game was a 5-4 result, and frankly, the ease by which we decimated the Arsenal defence to get crosses in was alarming. The AI of the computer controlled players - while occasionally spot-on - frequently seems to have wandered in from another sport.

Our favourite? A bizarre shot on an open goal from six yards out that threatened the corner flag. Club Football also rarely encourages invention, instead happy to reward the same tactics over and over again, and the wonderful fluidity that sits at the heart of Pro Evolution Soccer is merely a pipe dream here.

In short, there is a long way to go for the franchise until it can properly fight FIFA and PES. Because as things stand, it offers no reason to switch away from either.

A passable football title that enters a market where two others are far more established and play an all-round better game. It's not bad, but you can't help feeling there's a long way to go.