In Dirty Bomb, ruined London streets and abandoned train stations play host to multiplayer skirmishes where teams fight to complete objectives amid a hail of white-hot gunfire. It's a twitch shooter at its most extreme: an arena of quick kills, high energy, and tired pinky fingers mashing down the sprint key. This fire-from-the-hip shooter arms you with shotguns, sniper rifles, knives, and, fittingly enough given the ongoing motifs, a cricket bat. Unfortunately, a lack of fresh ideas keeps the game from being memorable, while some bothersome glitches and lag stifle your enjoyment.

The formula is a recognizable one. In fact, if you're well-versed in shooters, you can spot where Dirty Bomb derives its influence. There are ingredients from

Dirty Bomb moves at a brisk stride, but can't help making a few awkward stumbles. Expect the game to occasionally freeze, crash, and kick you from matches--all three could cause you to earn a punishment if you don't return to a competitive match quickly enough. These problems, while annoying, are thankfully rare, especially compared to the far more frequent problem regarding lag. And I don't just mean the slight, second-long delays in the menu--which is also irritating. While playing, some shots that clearly miss can somehow strike a target, while bullets from your enemies can still find your fleshy posterior even as you round a corner into safety. More than once, while in the death screen, I saw the stationary ghostly figure of my attacker, and his or her shot going through a wall and striking my opaque mercenary in the back--leaving me to scratch my chin and sigh as I waited to respawn. It isn't necessarily abysmal or game-breaking, but if you're a competitive-shooting stickler like me, you will become increasingly aggravated as the game's lag-charged issues become more obvious the longer you play.

These are not new problems, either. Skimming through the game's forums, it appears that lag and other server woes have defined the Dirty Bomb's development for some time. From what I gather, the game does perform better now than it has in the past, but the road to stability continues to stretch onward. The game would also benefit from more varied maps and game modes. In its current version, there are only a handful of stages to play on, and with modes that range from objective or, well, faster objective, the game does eventually stray into tedium. There is a team deathmatch on its way, which might curb the monotony.

Defined by its predecessors, Dirty Bomb straddles the divide between old and new, never quite able to step out of the shadows of the games that came before. Still, if you're looking for a decent multiplayer shooter on the very cheap, Dirty Bomb is a fast-paced possibility. However, I'm not confident that the core will improve enough for the game to reach beyond merely ordinary. While Brink sits in history as a game that tripped on its path to fame, Dirty Bomb will be fortunate to be remembered at all.