Let's get the positive aspect (yes, that word is singular) out of the way. The voice acting is excellent. From the lead, voiced by Lance Henrikson, who you'll remember from TV's "Millennium" and the movie "Alien" (when he played Bishop the android), to Clancy Brown (the bad guy in "Highlander"), Thomas F. Wilson (Biff in "Back to the Future"), Kate Mulgrew ("Star Trek Voyager"), Cree Summer ("Rugrats") and Michael Ironside (too many credits to pick just one, but I liked "V," so we'll go with that) to name a few. Someone went out of their way to find top talent to voice this game. There's simply no comparing the voice work of professional actors to the flat, uninspired droning found in many games. It's too bad that whoever was in charge of rounding out the voice cast didn't have a bigger hand in the rest of the game.

The opening scene is a dream sequence which I'm sure is meant to offer a glimpse into the tortured psyche of our main character. But all you'll likely notice is the immediate cheesecake factor of that character's girlfriend in her underwear. This isn't necessarily a problem, but once you realize that was the most entertaining part of the next 45 minutes of your life you might feel differently.

After your character wakes up, it becomes apparent that he's in command of a huge space station. Now the nightmare begins: Running around a nondescript space station looking for things to do. Check that door. It's locked. Get turned around, try to check it again, nothing happens. It doesn't say it's locked. It doesn't say anything. If some piece of scenery isn't accessible to your character, it will tell you once and then fall silent, so you better remember what it told you the first time. After that it may as well be a wall.

That, with occasional interruptions for cut scenes, fairly represents your next twenty minutes as you search for your girlfriend. There's no crisis yet, mind you, she's just waiting for you somewhere. The setting is a watered-down, 50/50 mix between "Star Trek" and "Alien." There's even a video game room that looks like the Holodeck before it's turned on. Samantha, your girlfriend, brought you here to see the new video game her brother likes. The game consists of messing with force field switches for a few minutes. When you're done, your character makes a comment along the lines of, "Her brother's got lousy taste in video games." How ironic.

A little more wandering and you're in the firing range with Samantha. It's a quick primer on control for the game. Then you're off to gather some samples of something with some other busty chick in a space suit. You come back and find the station a mess. The main character goes to a computer terminal and tries to punch up a view of the station from the security cameras, and as he waits for it to get moving he looks exasperated and says, "C'mon, c'mon, c'mon." I hear ya, brother! By now it's been about 45 minutes of doing almost nothing but wander around. Checking doors, memorizing what they say, and watching one cut scene after another. 45 minutes, zero action. Maybe the buildup will be worth it.

It's not. It won't take a video game veteran to realize almost immediately that enemies will pop into a room one at a time. Enter room, wait for first alien to pop into view, shoot it. Repeat. Find what you're looking for, leave. Repeat. It's a lot like reading shampoo instructions.

Things don't improve over the course of the game. The cut scenes don't get any shorter or less frequent. Minigames keep popping up but are so simplistic and pointless they add nothing to the experience. The quests are just prolonged searches for a particular item. The controls are clunky and the camera causes an untold amount of headaches. The graphics are particularly disappointing considering the development time for this game. It looks like something you'd find on the Playstation 2 a year ago.

But let's be honest, by the time you get that far you've probably yanked out the CD and snapped it into many tiny pieces. The references to video games from the 80s, product placement and the like seem to be attempts at adding personality to the game. None of it works. Run Like Hell goes from easy to very hard and stays boring and derivative all the way through. Looking for a recommendation? The name of the game says it all.