Fight Club review

Okay. We could bang on about how Fight Club isn't actually about fighting, but an attack on the sort of consumerist culture that - for instance - licenses out popular films and makes them into games.

Or we could point out that in Fight Club, the winner doesn't matter, so that the structure of the game - which revolves around travelling between groups and hitting incidental characters from the films - doesn't make sense. We could even question the inclusion of kung fu-style spinning kicks that aren't actually in the film, or ask why Raymond the 7-Eleven clerk is running the Chicago chapter.

But that's not the point. The point is, Fight Club is awful. Awful in a way that beat-'em-ups aren't allowed to be any more. Awful in a broken-collection-detection, stupid-AI way that makes you want to hit the developers as hard as you can. Compared to 'underground' fighting games like Def Jam, it doesn't have any of the punch or crackle. Compared to 'realistic' fighting games like UFC, it's fluffy like cotton-wool. And compared to the film, it's an embarrassing quasi-philosophical shambles. Read the book instead.

Fight Club is out for PS2 and Xbox now