Certain noises are terrifying. The shattering crash of a downstairs window being put through, late at night when you're tucked up in bed. The squeal of car brakes locking up on black ice. But none are quite as chilling as the noise a plumber makes: that slow, drawn-out tut-tutting as he surveys your bathroom, sombrely shaking his head. This sound, which we're all familiar with, is effectively a death knell for the humble wallet.

And it was exactly that sort of laboured tutting we found ourselves producing as we ploughed through the initial missions of SunAge, a very retro-looking real-time strategy game. That's a polite way of saying the graphics are crap. Actually, that isn't fair; they're almost passable aside from the crude animation, particularly the vehicles which resemble some sort of Lego tanks built by a two-year-old, floating oddly over the landscape.

This wasn't the cause of our consternation, however. Our major problem was the fact that playing SunAge felt just like constructing the aforementioned Lego tank blindfolded, with our hands smothered in glue, and with someone standing on our handiwork every five minutes. Let us explain...

'Fiddly' is the key word here. SunAge is more fiddly than a tax-dodging folk festival organiser. For starters, the controls require you to unlearn traditional RTS wisdom. Right-clicking on a unit doesn't order a move and attack; it merely sets the enemy as a preferred target. And while that's a useful tactical control, you'll still spend ages in the early game right-clicking and wondering why the hell that platoon is just standing there scratching their collective arses.

There's no 'select all units' shortcut either, so each squad has to be moved individually. We appreciate that the developer is trying to make SunAge a more tactical, thinking man's RTS with these sort of tweaks, but when moving troops behind your own lines where there's no strategic manoeuvring necessary, it's a total pain to be forced to click separate movement orders for ten different squads. RSI anyone?

Depending on your gaming temperament, you might well acclimatise to these game design decisions quickly enough, but the unintentional fiddly bits will surely finish you off. Such as the game's habit of randomly splitting up your hot-keyed groups of units. Yes, randomly, as far as we could tell. Or the clumsy formation system which takes lots of spinning and jiggling around with the mouse to select the required formation. Or the poor path-finding of your units.

There are other obvious bugs, too. These vary from graphical glitches to cut-scenes playing slightly out of sync, but the biggest problem by far is the crashing. We had one game crash, corrupting our last save in the process, forcing us to replay half a scenario over again. Then we experienced a repeated crash at the end of a level which had us tearing our hair out. This is what we meant by someone occasionally stamping on your efforts in the earlier blindfolded Lego-building analogy.

And all this nonsense happened with the latest patch installed at the time of review. It's just not good enough, quite frankly, and SunAge is an RTS we're simply going to try to forget.

Here's a game for everyone who wants to redefine the acronym RTS: the Really Trying Strategy game.