I’m not a big fan of companies using sex to advertise video games. I think it is pretty immoral and degrading for woman themselves. It is then that The Charge uses that very concept for its box artwork. The Charge once booted up contains no sexual scenes at all, so a disappointment to those hormonal teenagers that thought they were going to get something more than just a woman in PVC gracing us at the death screens or at the title. Was this attempt to sex it all up a veil for the fact that the game is actually quite a rather simple affair? The likelihood is high.

So what is The Charge? Well, it’s basically a reflex skill game whereby you need to fly through hoops in a tunnel whilst in a cockpit view of a ship, if you clip a hoop your ship then crashes and its game over. At the game over screen you are greeted with the PVC clad woman with her head thrust to the side in disappointment with the visual polish of someone who’s used Adobe Photoshop once. It’s a twitch game essentially and we’ve reviewed a couple of them Asteroids Do Concern me being one of those games, The Charge gives that same style of game play but in a 3D perspective – In actual fact, it’s a more exciting game than the other twitch games we’ve played, mainly because of the fact that when the speed really does increase, you are crammed in such a tight spaced tunnel that anything other than a subtle move will result in your death, so it inadvertently is more addictive than I thought it would be, however there are problems.

Firstly when we first got the code for this game, The Charge would not work and this was down to the high score leader board servers being down, this resulted in the game exiting back to the dashboard. 24hrs later, the game was working again but when we checked the high score leader board we can only assume that they were reset, or that so few people played this game that somehow on a mediocre score of 379 we managed to hit second on the global leader board. So this is definitely an area of weakness. Menu presentations with the big busted woman are tacky, there has been no real finesse with this area of development and there is scope to expand this game but adding a few game modes, but currently there is nothing like that available.

Our biggest gripe though is the music. It is fucking terrible! The game doesn’t feature sci-fi music or dub-step, instead it’s a power pop song by a band we couldn’t care to name which is called you have guessed it, The Charge. The music doesn’t complement the game in the slightest, poorly composed and the lead singer has an annoying voice. Zebra Games would have been better off using some free sound samples from Ian McCleod than use the one song available throughout the whole time we played the game. The game needs some updates and a re-think over how it presents itself for us to really recommend, as it stands it needs more polish as a complete package. We’ll let you know if they process a game update.