CID The Dummy

 ...that's not the sound of CID, by the way, as you might expect his aluminium, acetate resin and polyurethane foam composite frame to make when repeatedly punctured in multiple simulated high speed collisions. As much as we relish the thought of his former tortuous existence, CID the Dummy has been released from servitude to find Professor Werken's daughter with his newly granted powers.

Apparently, he's been given the power to mercilessly annoy us too, because this is actually the sound of us slapping the CID The Dummy box against our foreheads, over and over and over. Unfortunately the human skull is too tough to be a good crash test subject in collisions with Wii game boxes, which is a shame because knocking ourselves clean out might have been a quicker way to stop playing CID the Dummy than getting up to simply switch it off.

Among CID's other powers in this pseudo two-dimensional platformer is the ability to frustrate us. For example, when constantly fumbling our attempt to unsling a rubber-bullet-firing bazooka from his backpack using an ungainly Wii remote manoeuvre, or the ability to exasperate us as we’re forced to leg it back down the corridor to turn the security alarms off, because the wall hugging sneak technique didn't respond in time to save us from the gaze of the cameras. And subsequently, the ability to crucify us when tackling more than one bad guy at a time, because a vertical Wii Remote shake does not an accurate attack method make.

He does have the power to make us laugh – at him, at least. Activating CID's super-run was eagerly demonstrated to us in the tutorial level by Professor Werken: our puerile sense of humour made short work of figuring out why the Professor's innocuous horizontal hand motions should have been brought at least another six inches above the waist for CID The Dummy to make the nine 'o clock watershed.

CID The Dummy isn't all bad though, there are the mandatory collectibles, dotted around like so many rabbit droppings in a pasture and the staple über power known as 'Panic Mode', activated once you collect ten orbs. But at least there's more imagination here than the token effort we see in Wii shovelware these days.

CID is a dexterous dummy considering he's survived a thousand bone-splintering side-impacts, wall-jumping and climbing the scenery, provided you can pick it out from the ordinary backdrop (don't play CID The Dummy on an analogue CRT telly – it’s a mess). You can also use his powers to discover secret areas, like using the super-run to launch CID off springs and through weak sections of wall. Sonic did this better back in his Megadrive days and all of CID’s bolt-on powers have been upstaged in one way or another in the 16-bit generation. But at least we were reminded of the two-dimensional platform glory days for a nanosecond in all of that chuff. It’s more than we can say for some of the landfill we’ve reviewed on the Wii.

Cid The Dummy’s coup-de-gras is his ability to crucify the player: having been crushed, punched, zapped and bitten we lost all of the five lives available to us on normal mode and in an archaic nod to the less evolved bits of yesteryear’s games, we were forced to start all over again. No continue and no checkpoint, just the same excruciating puzzles, monotonous music and Dr Werken’s whiney voice all over again. Sod that CID. You may be able to endure that pain indefinitely, but we’re only human.