Being immortal would be great wouldn't it? You could do all those things that you're scared of doing in case you die; cliff diving, base jumping or walking through South London late at night.

Imagine being immortal and instead of trivial things like jumping of high stuff, you had to battle demons in a bleak, run-down city. Well, someone's already had that idea, and made it into a computer game, and called it Neverdead, so stop imagining because there could be lots of legal issues.

Cursed with immortality 500 years ago, Bryce Boltzmann has now become a bitter, alcoholic demon-slayer for hire. He is joined by human private investigator and eye candy Arcadia as they must discover and defeat the source of a demon invasion in their city.

Obviously Bryce can't be killed, but Arcadia can, which means that as Bryce, you must protect her when she's overwhelmed by demons. While Bryce can't die, he can be dismembered, decapitated and generally ruffed up. Bryce can continue to fight while losing a arm or leg, even both legs. All he has to do is locate his lost limbs (which have a handy on-screen pointer) and reconnect them. If his head comes off, it can roll around until it finds the rest of his body to reconnect. If it takes too long to find a limb, one will grow back in its place, like a lizard's tail.

Having the ability to dismember himself, this serves in Bryce's favour when, out of ammo, he can pull of an arm and throw it at the demons or he is able to roll his head through otherwise inaccessible places, like small vents, and regenerate at the other end.

Equipped with a large arsenal that gets bigger and more boombastic along the journey, Bryce is not short of weapons to take on the demons. The environment is interactive as well, which can be used to your advantage, when shooting explosives, or blasting through walls to get to different areas, or to kill the demons.

The control system uses both control sticks (we played the PS3 version, but we imagine it's the same for Xbox), the third-person view uses the left to run around, and the right controls the camera. This causes problems as you constantly need to keep both thumbs on the control sticks to keep yourself facing the right way. When navigating through some of the areas, this leaves you disorientated, wondering whether you've actually been in that room before or need to go through it to advance. In the heat of battle, with trying to co-ordinate moving, aiming and shooting/slashing creatures, it often leaves your view wildly swinging between looking straight down at the floor and staring straight up into the sky. 

When you inevitably trying and shooting at your own feet, the monsters attack and tear you apart. The fights follow a traditional pattern of, a couple of shots or slashes, you getting pulled apart, running around gathering yourself back together, a couple of more shots, getting pulled apart, trying to find your lost limbs and repeat until all the demons are dead.

With exclusive tracks from Megadeth, the sound is pure heavy metal, with roaring guitar riffs in the heat of battle adding to the atmosphere and intensity of the game.

Overall, Neverdead is a idea, a detailed good-looking game, with an interesting and absorbing story. It is just unfortunate, not to mention irritating, that the clumsy aiming-camera system is too much to control especially at vital moments that it overwhelms everything good and ruins the game.