Game refuses to start, specs and drivers all up to standard

[shanyi]

SOLVED

Further online investigation revealed the Avast! Antivirus firewall to be the source of the game's failure to run. Given my previous suggestion I had been sold a faulty product, I'd like to apologise for that incorrect insinuation and suggest any other users experiencing this problem attempt the following steps:

1) Open Avast!
2) Go to 'Real Time Shields', then 'Expert Settings'
3) Go to 'Exclusions'
4) Add the .exes for any games not launching. If you're running from Steam, you may be required to input the entire file location. Either way, Avast asked me if I wanted to run the program normally once the .exe exclusion had been inputted, so I chose the appropriate option and all seems to be working fine now.

Hope that helps.