9mm

Imagine you recruited a bunch of teenagers, got them all hopped up on espresso and sugary snack treats, made them stay up all night watching a mixture of The Shield and bad 80s action movies, and then asked them to design a videogame. Chances are that you’d get 9mm.

It veers between brilliantly inventive and hilariously awful like a drunk-driven 1976 Ford Torino racing the wrong way through rush hour traffic. It’s the story of John "Loose" Kannon, the leader of a group of hard-boiled cops who aren’t scared to bend the rules to get the job done – basically The Shield’s Strike Team, led by a young Mel Gibson. They kill a drug kingpin’s brother and steal all his money and it all kind of kicks off from there, in a story that could only have been scripted by caffeine-crazed, sleep-deprived youngsters on a Vic Mackey-inspired sugar high.

Honestly, such language! Such posturing! Such a ludicrous plot! And it comes with a choice of unsatisfactory two control schemes – one where you need about three hands, and one where you wave your iOS thing around and still need about three hands, both of which tend to result in you flailing into a wall while a tattooed Mexican empties a shotgun into your head. You really need the gyroscopic directional controls, even though you quickly end up facing the wrong way and need to correct them by swiping the screen. Plus! On top of all that you have special bits where you do important police stuff like interrogation, fist fighting and avoiding low-hanging signs while shooting at a getaway car from the roof of a speeding truck, through the medium of tapping and swiping at on-screen stuff.

It’s messy but when it works – that is, when you’re comfy with the controls, laying waste to a horde of Mexican gangsters and not being bothered by the nonsensical plot – it works rather well, and to sweeten the deal there’s a full dose of multiplayer, in which we spent a lot of time getting one-shot killed by people with much better weapons. God help us but we really rather like it, in the same way that we have a very hard time turning the telly off and going to bed if Lethal Weapon comes on late at night.