C.O.R.E. calls itself an action/shooter game, but I found myself doing little of either. The game drops you into the shoes of a member of an armed soldier tasked with discovering what happened in a top-secret laboratory, but before I found out why any of that was important, I found myself wandering around the very first level wondering where the hell to go.

The levels in C.O.R.E. (or at least, the one level I could actually navigate) made me feel like a rat in a maze, with walls in exactly one color. What’s worse, doors that are unlocked, doors that require a key and doors that are there just for the heck of it all look exactly alike. Combine those factors with a complete lack of a map feature, and you get a recipe for instant frustration as you wander around the same drab-looking corridors over and over again until you run out of ammo and are eventually killed by weird-looking floating brain things that shoot lasers.

I got far enough to get two guns in C.O.R.E.. The first was the pistol, which had a slow rate of fire and did pathetic damage to the enemies. The machine gun fixed the first problem, but the enemies would casually react to my steady stream of bullets as if I had just squirted them with a Super Soaker. To top it off, the enemies you’ll encounter see you as soon as you enter the room and shoot with the reaction time of an elite Marine, even on Easy.

Fortunately, enemies are few and far between, leaving you much more time to wander around, desperately looking for the objective — or at least for a room that doesn’t look like it was designed by an extra-depressed Jackson Pollack.

Because C.O.R.E. fails to give you a map, a guide arrow or any vague hint of where you’re supposed to go and what you’re supposed to do when you get there, I didn’t get very far. But given the game’s overall blandness, I’m not sure I would have even wanted to. Perhaps the one good thing I can say is that C.O.R.E. sports a multiplayer mode that only required one game cartridge. Everyone knows that misery loves company.