If you've played video games for any length of time, you've undoubtedly had a frustrating experience that inspired you to start yelling at your television. Nine times out of 10, this rarely produces any appreciable results, but with LifeLine, Konami's new voice-activated adventure game, the primary gameplay mechanic forces you to talk to the main character by using a USB headset. LifeLine represents an ambitious undertaking, so the developer certainly deserves credit for trying something different. However, the experience is undermined by unreliable technology and some poor game design.

LifeLine's voice-recognition technology forces you to talk your way through the game.

LifeLine begins during a Christmas party at the grand opening of a new hotel. However, this isn't just any hotel. It's a space station hotel that's suspended in Earth's orbit. As you and your girlfriend Naomi enjoy the revelry with the rest of the guests, something terrible suddenly happens. The room is flooded with terrifying creatures--who are presumably aliens--and all hell breaks loose. You get separated from your girlfriend, and the next thing you know, you find yourself sealed inside the space station's main control room. You're trapped, but you are able to see every room in the station, thanks to the hotel's myriad of security cameras. Furthermore, since you have access to the space station's central computer, you can open and close virtually any door. You eventually come across a waitress named Rio, who's locked up in the space station's barracks. She's looking for a journalist who was at the party, and you're looking for your girlfriend Naomi. As a result, the two of you team up to help each other find the people you're looking for so that you can all get off of this monster-infested space station.

So there's the setup. You're unable to directly control the game's main character, but you can open some of the doors she comes upon--and you can tell her what to do and where to go by using the USB headset. Rio responds exclusively to voice commands, so if you want her to do something, you'll have to talk her through it. Think of it like a high-tech version of the old text-parsing adventure games like King's Quest or Zork and you have a rough idea of the type of gaming-by-proxy experience you're in for.

LifeLine is by and large an adventure game. You'll explore the space station while looking for keys and other items that will help you get past locked doors and various puzzles. Movement is made fairly simple by virtue of the fact that any location you need to go to--even within a single room--is discretely labeled on the game's overlay map. Once you've reached a specific location, you'll be given a view of all the items at that location worth examining. From here, you basically have to guess what an item is before Rio can interact with it. This can be flabbergasting at times, since it's not always entirely clear what an item is. Using colors, shapes, and locations to describe an item can help sort things out more quickly, but the whole guessing game process can still prove to be quite arduous. Most of the game's puzzles are pretty obvious, but the real challenge usually involves trying to figure out the exact phrasing that the game is looking for. There are also points where the solution to a puzzle is needlessly cryptic, thus making some kind of walk-through--or an extremely patient and persistent personality--a necessity.

Despite the game's unusual controls, LifeLine is a pretty standard adventure game.

The game breaks up the straight adventure elements with some light combat sequences. As you wander the rooms and corridors of the space station hotel, you'll regularly run into the monsters that caused the initial havoc. The combat basically requires you to ferret out the monsters' weak points in order to dispose of them, which is done by targeting specific parts of their anatomy. The combat is pretty easy when you're facing a single enemy, but things get a lot harder when there are three or four enemies coming at you at once. The voice recognition simply doesn't react fast enough, which will likely inspire you to shout your commands quickly. This, of course, doesn't make it any easier for the game to understand what you're saying, which just exacerbates the problem. Simply put, LifeLine tries to do too much with a clunky combat system, and it will regularly leave you quite flustered.