Greed Black Border, from Headup Games, has one of the strangest control schemes I’ve ever seen. You use the mouse to both shoot and move. But you can’t do both at the same time. So you have to run, stop, shoot, run, stop shoot.

At first this was irritating. It still is in some ways. In most games you’re able to do both at the same time but Greed simply can’t manage to handle this and so it’s a lot of the above. On top of that, you can’t shoot around things like handrails all of the time. You have no way to aim around things that you should be able to shoot through.

The game casts you in the role of a space marine and you have to go kill zombie-like people, solve the mystery and collect stuff along the way. Sound familiar? Probably because it’s the same storyline as a half dozen games in recent years.

What makes Greed different? Not much. The isometric view is pretty much locked into place. You might manage to move the camera around while moving or shooting but it’s cumbersome because the camera requires you to hold down the CTRL key to move it and as soon as you let go it snaps back into the original position. Plus, in regards to movement, you must guide your character around any kind of obstacle or it will simply get stuck a lot of the time. The tutorials consist on small, on-screen, text telling you what the controls are and it’s a lot of reading all in all for an action game.

Why am I talking so much time to talk about the controls and interface? Because they suck a lot of fun out of what could have been a game that was fun to play. The combination of the shoddy mouse controls, when combined with the no walking and shooting makes for some frustrating gameplay at times.

In terms of graphics, the game looks decent enough. The environments are detailed and interesting and the enemies are varied and look good. Of course they have strange names like "Saw Master" which I’m guessing is actually his job title and not his name. There are also some strangely placed enemies, like poison spiders, bomb spiders and other robots which made me think "why would they have these things here on a damaged mining ship." The story was so bland I have forgotten the details but I’m pretty sure that was the kind of ship we were on.

Is the game fun? Mildly. From time to time you’ll forget all the problems and be able to enjoy it. But then the game will interfere with that fun and you’ll be left wondering why exactly you paid for it. In fact the more I play this game the more I realize that it is an exercise in futility and was designed only to frustrate the player. The hotkey for Inventory is C, and can’t be changed, not the standard I and the key configuration is only for some of the controls. The game tells you to save inventory space by using the Scrap function, but then does not tell you how to do that (small icon on screen I randomly moused over that looked like part of the currency counter).

Really, just stay away from this game and go play Alien Breed Evolution which is just about the same thing but more interesting and at least uses a two-stick control scheme on the Xbox 360. In fact, aside from the aliens, there’s very little that makes this game much different from that one.