For several years, the traditional point and click genre, a mainstay of the early-to-mid Nineties, seemed to have breathed its last. Lucasarts, once the pioneer of the finest examples of this particular game type, had gone back to churning out countless Star Wars tie-ins and the dominance of the console market had pushed the humble olde adventure game into an embarrassingly small niche. However, the stylus control of the DS has seen something of a reanimation of the genre of late; the Phoenix Wright series and other recent decents such as Hotel Dusk and Professor Layton and the Curious Village have brought the traditional adventure game back, with more than a hint of style. However, these have also perhaps allowed a few mediocre also-rans into the fold. Since we at Acegamez don't force you to read through a review before unveiling our scores, it's safe to say that Undercover is indeed one of these sad pretenders.

In Undercover: Dual Motives, you get to play as two characters who are employed by a scientific research facility. Not the shiny, chromed structures you may be used to seeing in big-budget films - these folk work in huge, red brick monstrosities, where each scientist has their own massive lab and is working on a project that is not only separate from the others, but also under a veil of secrecy, even to their co-workers. The unlikelihood of the game's premise is a lesser problem, but it's an early symptom of the host of inconsistencies, contradictions and sheer nonsense elements that characterise the game's plot.

Without revealing too much of this faulty plot, the main character, John Russell, is framed for a murder that happened within the research complex, and you have to save him from the blame by discovering the real culprit. The game world is drawn in fairly detailed pre-rendered style, mitigating somewhat the fact that the environment is mostly unconvincing. A pub placed outside a remote research facility, where apparently only a handful of people work, most of whom are forever tinkering with generic scientific doo-dads in their ludicrously large laboratories? I think not. Even taking these issues with a pinch of salt that exceeds our recommended daily allowance, the other design limitations make sure that Undercover sinks into a bland mush. The dialogue is singularly terrible and unless the story dictates that you talk to someone, your conversations will generally consist of farewells and nothing else, while the quality of the writing is poor, often sounding as though it has been translated several times, to the point of being devoid of personality and, fairly frequently, sense.

It's probably a good thing then that the game makes almost no attempts at fleshing out any of its characters. In fact, the main drive of characterisation here is gender difference. So, women don't like anything that might be labelled 'icky' and will refuse to risk dirtying their clothes at all costs, even in life or death situations. Men on the other hand like beer, have excellent co-ordination and virtually no insight into human nature. To say this archaic gender stereotyping ever reaches truly offensive levels would be overstating matters. It's all so grey that it can only really muster an exasperated sigh.

The characters all look nice enough and are in keeping with the pseudo realistic look of the game world, but even then some are miscast, for want of a better word. Take the secondary main character, Audrey; in spite of Undercover's insistence on adopting a decades-old approach to female mannerisms, Audrey looks like Brigitte Nielsen. With an intense, short haircut and a jawline that puts most male leads to shame, she may look like a great character, but her appearance feels entirely at odds with her personality.

All the characters are skeletal, which means that when puzzles involving characters do crop up, there are precious few personalities to hook them onto. The result is a succession of mostly random tasks that you have to accomplish, with barely any clues as to how to do them. For example, at one point you have to distract a professor in one of the labs, the door of which is locked. Considering that there's a maintenance shaft between the laboratories, logic suggests that perhaps you should try going through one of them. However, what you actually have to do is construct a rudimentary blow dart and shoot him in the back of the head - through a window that, from the player's point of view, appears to be closed. Of course, you only get told that you need to attract his attention somehow, with the need for the blowdart being something you have to divine from thin air. These issues are almost always present to some extent in games of this type, but Undercover: Dual Motives displays a particularly mean streak in clue-giving. When this is combined with the sheer lack of charm that the game exhibits, the result is a sense of frustration that is likely to put you off before the mystery is solved. Since the game is also fairly short, this is no small feat.

It's a pity that Undercover fails so spectacularly in some core areas, because not only is it a lot more similar to the traditional adventure games of old than say Phoenix Wright, it also has a handful of reasonably good elements. There are a number of mini-games weaved in, which are very light and would not stand up to repeated play, but most are pleasant enough. One, which sees you manipulating a paperclip with the stylus to pick locks, is even a tiny bit original. Undercover also manages to avoid pixel-hunting and overly long walking around by giving you a button that reveals all the item 'hot spots' in a scene, and allowing you to move freely through each location using the map. However, in the shadow of Undercover's unrelenting drabness, these positive points are trifles.

Undercover: Dual Motives is a featureless landscape of a game that whilst visually respectable is horribly clichéd with poor writing, shallow stereotypes instead of well formed characters and a largely uninteresting story. You're likely to forget what you're doing between playing sessions, and the game offers no prompts or useful clues to jog your memory. Then again, perhaps this is a game that's better just being forgotten altogether.

Reviewed by Andrew Williams for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).