I must admit that when I heard about the game Coffee Break I was instantly on the backfoot. How can they make a good game about such a mundane, dull and uninteresting subject? Surely a game such as The Sims covers that and much, much more, so why make this one? I was sincerely hoping that I would be pleasantly surprised, but such things only happen once in a blue moon.

The preview material for this game, released a few weeks back, claimed that Coffee Break would have "unique gameplay: perform all sorts of bad tricks to achieve your goals - but all in a very humorous way. Fun, fun, fun!" In Coffee Break, you can play as one of two characters, or employees as it were. At the start of the game you are dropped into the middle of an office with no help whatsoever, save the odd dialogue box that tells you to use the photocopier for photocopies (really!?!) and use your computer for making charts (you don't say!?!) What they don't tell you is where to find these. I spent a good twenty minutes meandering about the limited surroundings of the office, trying to find everything and work it out for myself. A tutorial, such as is the norm in pretty much every other game, would have been very helpful indeed.

After the initial frustration of learning the whole office, you then embark on the gameplay, which forms a series of challenges that you have to try and conquer. There are lots of tasks on offer and you can pass them all very easily, negating the need to retry any of them and allowing you to race through the game without having to concentrate or engage with the title. Tasks are fairly diverse but wholly dull. You can embezzle from your company, dodge boring meetings, calm down clients you've not put together that important document for, chat up the secretary everyone fancies… as the promotional blurb states, "basically, all things that happen everyday in every company around the world!"

This begs the question, why would you want to work all day long then come home and relive the pain in your leisure time? Sure, The Sims is a success, but that's because it tries to encompass every facet of life, from starting a family to dancing the night away in a nightclub. What The Sims does is allow people to make up fictional lives to compensate for what they feel are the inadequacies in their own life. So, a single man who's been that way for a while can go onto The Sims and romance a fictional female in one evening's play. That's why The Sims works and Coffee Break just doesn't. Nobody will ever look back at the end of their life on all those coffee breaks and think, "Shouldn't I have used those coffee breaks better? If only I could go back and relive them," whereas with The Sims they can build a whole new life on their PC, from conception all the way to the end of days. [Editor's note: AceGamez is not saying that Sims players are inadequate! I love The Sims myself and don't consider it a replacement for the real thing, just a bit of fun and escapism, like any other great game!]

As you move from one wacky, crazy task to the next, you have to try to form and foster relationships with your fellow colleagues. This sounds like an interesting prospect at first, until you realise that getting in the good books with the NPC characters is nothing more than clicking on the speech topics - it hardly matters which one you choose and you don't know which ones are bad until after you click them anyway. Now and again you'll come across a particularly stubborn character, but a few trips to the coffee machine tend to reel them in. So, yeah, as you can see, truly jaw-droppingly exciting stuff. And worst of all, that's the whole game! Each level involves you solving the same dull tasks we've all faced at work and chatting away to our fellow workers. This game couldn't feel farther from The Sims; it's more like a puzzle game set to the background of a sim. The gameplay continues on in this monotonous trend, so once you've played for thirty minutes, you've pretty much seen it all. It's also a very badly presented game and quite obviously hasn't been lavished with much love. The graphics are very basic, little better than those we saw about a decade ago in Theme Hospital, as is the sound, which for all I know could be very accurately depicting the sound of an office, but really why would I care?

Coffee Break isn't great, that much I imagine you've gleaned from my review so far. It could work as a free download, but as far as paying good money for this, please save up for something else instead. If this game had been released several years earlier, in advance of The Sims, then maybe I would have been more enamoured by it. As it stands however, it's low on concept, gameplay, graphics, sound and, more than anything, hugely far behind The Sims. Instead, try concentrating on your own real-life career and climbing up the promotional ladder, and leave this game to the die-hard sim fans who clamour nightly for the meaning of life on their PCs.

Reviewed by Ross Alexander for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).