Review by: Meghan Watt

When coupled with reliable controls, intriguing level design, and decent graphics, an FPS on the DS becomes more than just a novel idea. However, when these elements are noticeably absent, you get C.O.R.E.

Doom-esque in graphics and design, C.O.R.E. tosses you into the mind and body of a gruff marine who must battle his way through some government place with crazy scientists and maybe aliens and something about experiments gone wrong and a meteor... It doesn't matter. He has to go places and kill things. That's the story. What matters is that when his pumpkin-headed commander hands him an objective – something along the lines of “Go here” – he must traverse the gray, pixilated corridors, obtain the floating red keycard, and hopefully not die.

Unfortunately for Generic Soldier Man, the “not dying” part gets a tad tricky for a handful of reasons. To start, the controls are what we've come to expect from the Nintendo handheld FPS: strafe with the D-Pad, look and aim with the stylus. This is all well and good – especially when you manage to get the precision down, and you won't – but it goes terribly awry when an enemy jumps out from behind. Rather than quick turning, you have to scrape the stylus across the screen roughly three times. At this point, your boxy marine has most likely passed on.

Which brings us to point number two: Each foe can absorb several semi-automatic rounds before kicking the bucket. Your lovable protagonist, on the other hand, cannot. He, in fact, is rather fragile. So if your aim isn't topnotch, it won't be long before Mr. Glass needs a health station. Sadly, health stations, ammo dumps, and save points don't appear too often, and the game isn't kind enough to hand you a map. Thus, finding the next objective or backtracking to a previous save point can be a painstaking challenge, especially since one gray corridor looks almost identical to the other.

But living long enough to see the next save point may not be your biggest problem. Even with eight generic weapons at your disposal, your ammo cache runs dry far too fast. That means precision and quick reflexes must become your friends. Behind every door, a mad, heavily armed scientist could be lurking. So when the door snaps open, you must be ready for one to three enemies to open fire. Luckily, you can strafe. The baddies, on the other hand, stand indifferently in the face of death, giving you a blessed opportunity to aim for the head.

The 4-person multiplayer may be C.O.R.E.'s one redeeming quality in that it is decent. A few tried-and-true deathmatches and some rounds of CTF can actually be entertaining despite the agonizing controls. Best of all, you only need one copy between the four of you. Thus, there is no need to convince your friends that C.O.R.E. is awesome enough to buy just so that they can share your misery.

With outdated graphics, frustrating level design, and arduous controls, C.O.R.E. has only one positive quality: It isn't broken. It fits into your DS and, as a piece of software, functions smoothly. If you want more from a game, look elsewhere. C.O.R.E. isn't the only FPS on the block.

Questions or comments? We'd love to hear from you .