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Mindscape's 4D Sports Boxing works on two distinct levels. For the first part, its visually remarkable arcade-style action is simple to get to grips with and a hoot to play. It also contains a host of features which allow you to create, rain, fight and promote your own boxer.

The main draw of this one is the use of a graphic style more often associated with flight simulations than sports (although Palace's Tennis is a notable exception). Rather than sprite animation, the boxers are constructed solely from filled polygons. This approach allows for extremely realistic fights, using the whole ring rather than having the fighters rooted to the spot. Now boxers find themselves up against the ropes, in situations technically impossible in other such simulations.

It also means that the fighting can be viewed from one of nine different camera viewpoints. Mobile boom cameras offer the best coverage of most situations, since they automatically home in on a mid-point between the fighters. The most dramatic display is the point-of-view, which has you looking through the eyes of the boxer.

Once a degree of fighting prowess has been achieved with the default fighter, E=Mc2, a boxer can be 'constructed', His weight governs his league, while all other factors discern the fighter's style. There's a trade-off between speed and power, a choice of six different heads, and you can even opt for a southpaw boxer if you wish.

A potential champ can be saved to disk and launched into professional career, taking on computer-controlled fighters. Before each match, training time must be used to hone the fighter's skills. Plenty of footwork-improving skipping is the order of the day when preparing to do battle with an especially quick fighter.

Each bout offers a percentage of the purse, but young hopefuls should beware of big money matches at first, lest they suffer a career-ending pounding from a more experienced fighter.

4D Sports Boxing is simply one of the best sports simulations around at the moment. It has far more depth than previous contenders for the crown, and is unencumbered by fun-sapping preliminaries.

The intelligence of the camera positions avoids any potentially unfair situations where one player can't see what's going on, while equally smart control positioning makes it easy for two players to box using the keyboard controls without crowding - and that's despite each player using ten keys.

Fighting computerised opponents can be frustrating though. The skull-crushing hooks and crosses which so successfully felled novice humans tend to be deflected and diffused completely. Chances are, the more crowd-pleasing and extravagant your fighting style, the less likely you are to actually win.

Indeed, the computer-controlled boxers are disarmingly clinical. Let them inside your guard for more than two seconds and you end up flailing around looking more like George Formby than George Foreman.

The action sometimes becomes confusing, and it occasionally becomes tough to see whether your own punches are landing squarely or not. CGA, EGA, VGA, MCGA and Tandy are all supported, along with Roland and AdLib sound boards (although the samples played through the PC squeaker are impressive enough). Understandably, 4D Sports Boxing looks best on faster machines - on PCs upwards of 20Mhz, the action becomes downright frenetic. That said, even the most ambivalent sports viewers will be bowled over. Superb.

Here's handy... Distinctive Software has a library of generic routines for all machines, which means that the boys write all the code on a PC before simply transferring data to other machines and making format-specific tweaks. This means that Boxing will play almost exactly the same. Speed-wise it shouldn't be slow as to detriment the fun. There's the added bonus of sampled sounds, too.

This two disk incarnation doesn't boast any sampled sounds, but there's no reason why it will play very differently from its brothers.