Maximo vs. Army of Zin will not appeal to you if you like your video games gentle and unthreatening. It is an ugly beast of a challenge, full to the brim with nasty things that constantly try to kill you and often succeed. It is a game for the very patient and the very determined.

That is a roundabout way of saying it is for players who are happy to spend long evenings and longer nights hunched over their controllers, thumbing their way through the same territory over and over again, hoping hoping hoping that this time they will finally get it right and make it to the next checkpoint. It is for people who are content to face the risks of long-term incontinence that come with ignoring nature's call for hours on end. It is for people for whom the struggle is its own reward.

All this makes the thing sound about as fun as a root canal sans nitrous. And for most of the PlayStation demographic (i.e., people who bought the thing on account of the word "Play" in its name made it sound cheerful and entertaining), that is exactly how it will go over. Maximo vs. Army of Zin is only cheerful and entertaining if you like having to work super crazy hard on repetitive thumb exercises.

We have been here before. Maximo vs. Army of Zin is a sequel to something called Maximo: Ghosts to Glory, which appeared on store shelves nearly two years ago and won widespread approval among the bladder-be-damned set.

"Hey!" went a familiar refrain, "It's just like something from the 16-bit era!"

Some background: the 16-bit era was that time in video game history when the Super Nintendo and the Sega Genesis were the state of the art. The early '90s, basically. Many games of that vintage were wildly difficult exercises in repetitive thumbery that pitted a lone hero against hordes of attackers. "Beat-em-ups," these games were called. The idea was that you and your sword (or your fists or your raygun or what have you) were all that stood between civilization and the end of the world, and that you personally had to seek out and dispatch every single one of those evil monsters/robots/demons/mafiosi.

The first Maximo game did indeed recall those 16-bit beat-em-ups, inasmuch as it featured a similar take on The One Lone Hero Who Will Save Us All and the logistics of Good v. Evil. It looked much prettier than its forebears, mind. It was colourful and in rendered in charming 3D. It also featured prominent underpants, which was a genuine innovation in an otherwise unambitious throwback.

In the time since, we have all had time to sample and savour the magnificent Viewtiful Joe. In case you missed the holiday excitement, Joe was also a throwback to 16-bit beat-em-uppery. But it was also the best game of all of 2003, an exciting, silly, wildly charming toffeenugget that made you look forward to the nitrousless root canal. Joe was about video game designers limiting themselves to ten-year-old aesthetics and somehow producing something delicious and fresh. It was a revelation.

This leaves the new Maximo in a bit of a bind. It is entertaining indeed, provided you have the patience. But there is no nostalgia this time around; Viewtiful Joe owns that mindspace now, and he is not sharing. So what are we left with? We are left with an unrelentingly tough game that pits us (as the lone hero) against many thousands of evil robots. We have a lot of swordplay ahead of us. We have had a Big Gulp and we are wondering how much the effort is going to hurt. We find the prospect of More Of That a little exhausting, frankly.

On the bright side, the evil robots are powered by trapped human souls, which means we are in for some seriously good karma if we see this thing through.