We’ve got a confession to make. Every Saturday night, under the cover of darkness, we tiptoe out of our respective back doors and out onto the neon streets. Arriving at our local dingy tavern, we’re slipped a sweet tenner by the grinning landlord, before donning the same old wigs and belting out Gloria Gaynor’s ‘I Will Survive’ to an audience of penny-throwing drunks. It’s not something to be proud of, but it’s certainly a money spinner. Such is the case with Ubisoft’s Open Season and the guaranteed income doesn’t make events feel any less wrong.

It’s just so painfully clear that almost the entire development budget was blown on character models, backgrounds and the like before the whole thing was shoved into a suitcase marked ‘generic children’s adventure game A’ – the videogame equivalent of death. The main offender is the missions, which are almost exclusively an even spread between patronising stealth and ‘collect five of X’ nonsense.

Other superficial but nonetheless weakening wounds include a lack of lip-synching in the poorly framed cut-scenes, backward claustrophobic environments filled with hundreds of invisible walls that even a toddler would question, and an almost total lack of story-building content of any kind. The high point of the unlockable multiplayer mini-games is throwing rabbits into a hole for crying out loud, and you can do that for free in fields across the country (but don’t mention our names, if you’re caught). Ultimately, whilst the game tries to smile in your face and generally look inoffensive, you’ll feel robbed if you spend 50 quid on it.

Dave Shaw