One look at the box of Neighbours From Hell and we thought we were in for something akin to the majesty of the 8-bit classic, Spy vs Spy. Pull pranks on your neighbour? Make them mad? Don't get caught? It sounded like our kind of game.

Only that's not quite how things panned out. Neighbours From Hell puts you in the shoes of Woody, a reality TV star who has the job of playing lots of tricks on his neighbour. His every action is watched, and thus it's imperative to play lots of tricks and avoid getting caught. Up until that point, it was sounding fine.

The mechanics of how you go about this are fairly straightforward. The game uses both screens of the Nintendo DS machine, with the bottom one being used to control your inventory and the top one requiring that you use the thumbpad to explore the game world.

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It actually feels like a mix of platform game and adventure, as you walk around, checking out objects, and where possible combining them with items already in your inventory to set up a trick. Pull off a trick and you get a gold star. Depending on what game mode you're tackling, getting enough gold stars is the key to the next level.

What hurts the game, though, is how intolerant it is. Your main foe is Mr Rottweiler, who is going away on a cruise, and who you need to start by terrorising. The problem is that the game should give you a bit of space to set up your tricks and have fun with its concept. But if you don't sneak around quietly enough, you soon attract the attention of Mr Rottweiler, and when he catches you, you lose a life.

Sure, you can run, but that doesn't seem to do much. You only have three lives, and for the first hour we were regularly losing them and not having an awful lot of fun. No matter what we did, Mr Rottweiler wasn't too far behind, and there was no room to enjoy the whole idea of the game. Heck, this sort of thing should be brimming with humour, but in the end it took a real effort to stay engaged with the game.

Neighbours From Hell tries to spice things up with a few minigames, but these hardly ratchet up the entertainment levels to anything close to acceptable. And while the cartoony graphics and little cut scenes aren't without merit, Neighbours From Hell is simply too irritating, and not enough fun, to warrant either your time or money. A real disappointment and a surprising waste.

There are moments when the concept works here, but they're buried too deeply underneath the game's many annoyances. A real missed opportunity, sadly.