Helmet, Soho Theatre, London

Like any parent, I seriously wonder what these console games are doing to our children. For years, our household resisted them but was finally overwhelmed by peer pressure – second only to football, Nintendo has become the language of the new generation. Given the chance, our sons would spend hours buried inside Grand Theft Auto III or Metal Gear Solid II.

Yet while we worry about the child who emerges, never once does it occur to us that they might be safer inside the game than out in the real world. This is the premise of Douglas Maxwell's new play, exploring the emptiness in the life of Roddy, aka Helmet the teenage games addict. This is an emptiness he fills by haunting The Zone, Sal's computer game shop. But his obsessive custom has not been enough to save The Zone from bankruptcy and tomorrow the shop closes for good. Which leaves Sal, eldest son of an aspirant Asian family, with another failure to his name. So Roddy isn't the only one with an empty life.

Roddy, desperate, lonely and over-eager, idolises Sal, who seems to have everything he craves (unfettered access to the complete PlayStation catalogues). It does no good when Sal tells him that "being me is not the game you think it is". The result is a 70-minute see-saw between these two characters, structured like a console game, with lives lost and won in response to good or bad news, and each scene presented as a new Level. Each time a life is lost, the scene restarts, now giving the player a chance to get it right this time. A nifty theatrical metaphor but ultimately very wearing.

Two-man, single-location, continuous-time plays are problematic: how do you move the story forwards, how do you avoid unrealistic self-revelations? Sal tells Roddy about his family problems – but why would he share this with a sad loser? – and Roddy tells us about his baby brother dying in a caravan fire, but his self-awareness rings equally untrue. And the final plot twist is utterly unbelievable.

The acting is heavy-handed: as Sal, Ameet Chana plonks every line in front of us like the stand-up he once aspired to be. In the title role, Tommy Mullins inhabits his character more fully, but it's still an off-the-peg performance.

While never overtly didactic, the play seems laden with themes but devoid of outcomes, as though designed to segue straight into heated classroom discussion. Just as I have watched my children emerge dazed but unfulfilled from the console, I wandered out into the street, unstretched, unenlightened.

To 1 June (020-7478 0100)