When I first took a look at the screenshots and trailers for The Chase: Felix meets Felicity I surrendered somewhat to the charm of story: guy meets girl, must rush against all kinds of odds to meet her on time for a date. I fell for the lovely-looking graphical style, the hectic music and the general humour of the whole thing. Little did I know that when I actually slotted it into my DS that it would CURSE MY EVERY LIVING BREATH.

See, I am all for a bit of difficulty in my games and I do like a good challenge. Sadly, The Chase challenges you not with clever level design or tricky objectives, but with frustratingly inconsistent controls that pretty much undermine the entire experience. The general idea is that for most of the game’s levels your little dude (or dudette) will keep chugging along and building up speed, and via the D-pad and the touch screen you must guide them around obstacles and through pedestrians/other annoying progress stoppers and to the end of each level. Kind of like a platform game, except your character keeps running.

It sounds pretty decent, but the reality soon hits home as soon as you try the first level, hash around with the touch pad platform-drawing controls, die and then repeat a good few times. What’s supposed to happen is that you have a little bar which refills when you collect fruit by slapping into people or pick up flowers, and from this bar you can draw lines around the screen that your character will run along if they hit them.

What actually happens is that, whilst running from the ever-present looming rainstorm (basically a version of the old Mario scrolling screen wipe) you end up coming across sections of the level where you suddenly need to draw a line to reach a platform, with the chances being that you will miss. Hectically sketching on the screen to try and remedy this will leave a collection of lines dotted around that your character will become confused between and bump around like a rubber ball on an extremely violent bouncy castle, and more than often this will lead to you getting caught in aforementioned rain and having to restart the levels again.

This isn’t helped by your character’s interaction with the surrounding scenery being somewhat haphazard either. For example, jumping onto the top of a bus sometimes works, but sometimes sends you tumbling. Sliding an enemy works on occasion, whilst on others you end up getting bundled backward and halted in your tracks. Most of the time there is neither rhyme nor reason as to why the game chooses to do this, making it an annoying, teeth-grinding experience. The choice to have lives in the game hampers the experience further, leaving you feeling as if the game is punishing you for struggling to get to grips with the controls.

To be fair to the developers, they have tried to mix things up a little by giving you a couple of variants on the old left-to-right formula, although most are a case of the king’s new clothes. The most interesting type and the most different is the vertical ascent mode in which your usual line-drawing changes to some sort of bungee rope attachment that springs you upward to new platforms to avoid rising water, although quite why there would be rising water (or rain storms, come to think of it) in places such as an underground tube station are unbeknown to me. There are also modes in which you must collect scattered hearts and rescue some sort of animal (a turtle, a puppy and the like) that you must then carry through the entire level.

Problem is, each type of mode has some kind of flaw buried within it. The bungee rope one is somewhat frustrating due to the springy nature of the chord often propelling you into the air and across to the sides of the level, from which there is no real other option than to sit there and watch yourself plummet into the water below. The pet carrying levels are more often than not reduced to a one-hit death scenario where you accidentally bump into a pedestrian/commuter/idiot and the thing goes flying off backward, leaving you up the creek with no paddle and facing the ever-closing rainstorm. The fact that your character is so slow to gain momentum once they are stopped doesn’t help matters, either.

In the end, it all becomes too frustrating. On one hand the game is telling you that speed is crucial, but it often penalises you by then chucking in a section of a level that requires reflexes and drawing skills of a ninja to succeed at. The scores at the ends of the levels are shrouded in mystery and don’t seem to tally with what you end up doing on-screen, whilst the various discrepancies between what is and what isn’t a successful jump or slide means you are never particularly convinced of the outcome of various situations.

To summarise The Chase as a complete write-off is unfair though, as through the frustration and annoyance there is still enough charm and enough evidence of potential that it’s more of a case of disappointing execution than anything. The general idea of a hapless little guy or girl having to jump through hoops in order to score a date will produce a wry smile amongst the more cynical romantics out there, but even the most hard-edged gamer will struggle to keep smiling throughout the game’s constantly unforgiving, often flawed lifespan.