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Around The World is an overhead maze game featuring everyone's favourite lizard-like thing, Repton. It's actually the fourth outing in the Repton collection. It's also the first to come with forty screens and the redefined character sets that became synonymous with his later releases. The levels in it feature America (collect hamburgers instead of diamonds), the Arctic (fishes), The Orient (rice), Oceans (oysters) and Africa (pineapples).

In case you're not familiar with Repton and his adventures, all the Repton games are a variant of Boulder Dash, although its original author swore blind he'd never actually seen or played that game. You manoeuvre a green skinned reptile up, down, left and right through a maze of diamonds, boulders, monsters, keys, safes and spirits. The aim of each level of the game is to collect all of the diamonds before time runs out, and then "defuse the timebomb". This is another way of saying go to a particular place on the map and stand there.

What makes the Repton games in turn both addictive and memorable is the amount of thought required to complete them. Unlike Boulder Dash, Repton isn't the sort of game which can be played recklessly. Far from it. If you should let a rock fall somewhere where it blocks a single diamond, that will render the level uncompletable. This means you need to think very carefully about every move you make. That's not always easy, because although the game demands a lot of thought, it also has some more 'arcade style' inclusions. There are monsters, for example, that hatch from the eggs you have to dislodge when collecting some of the diamonds.

Monsters are not only deadly to the touch. They also get in the way, preventing you from going one way or another until you've crushed them beneath a rock. And crushing them isn't easy either. More often than not, you need to entice each monster out and then run vertically upwards, remove the earth from an overhead boulder and then move out to the left or right of the boulder, sending it plummeting downwards. However, there are some occasions where the game makes it slightly easier by giving you a rock that you can push directly onto a newly hatched monster.

You shouldn't confuse monsters with spirits either. Spirits are also deadly to the touch, but they cannot be crushed by boulders. Instead they follow the 'walls' of the maze, always keeping to the left of them. You can therefore predict exactly in what direction they will move. A spirit will disappear when, on its journey, it finds a cage; after this it turns into a diamond. Cages are also often used to "section off" whole other areas of maze, so when a spirit "unlocks" a cage, you will be able to enter hitherto unexplored parts of the level. A similar unlocking takes place when Repton finds a key, which turns all the safes in the maze into diamonds.

The game has one extremely annoying bug, which is common to all the games in the series. When you let a boulder fall, you need to be careful that it does not make contact with a spirit. If it does, the spirit can become "stunned" and start to move in a small circle from which it will never escape.

Around The World offers you an impressive forty levels of boulder-dropping fun, divided into level sets of eight with a common theme. There's also a level editor included so that you can redefine any of the levels you've already completed, and/or create your own levels with your own sprites. The graphics are a treat although the game is a little slower than you might expect and there's no background tune (as there is on the BBC version).

In an ideal world I think the game would actually offer the option to play with either with the redefined sprites or with the original Repton 3 sprites. That's because, at least for the first few plays of every new level set you load in, you're looking at a typical Repton maze, but all the redefined graphics mask the actual type of object that you are looking at. For example, the first level set is America, and America has Repton dressed up as a cowboy. The diamonds are hamburgers, the skulls are gallows (complete with noose), the spirits are bandits, the cells are jails, the monsters are Red Indians, the boulders are wagon wheels, etc, etc. The sprites are redefined in such a way that you sort of intuitively know what they are.

However, just as you've got used to one set of alternative character sets, you'll complete that set of screens and load in the next set of eight. The next set of eight will change them and you'll then have to "re-learn" the attributes of each sprite all over again. If you press M to view the map, you'll see that it always uses the "Repton 3" sprites to represent the items, giving you the curious ability to work out exactly what item you're standing next to by viewing the map.

It is unfair for a reviewer to label all these lovely new character designs a negative. If Around The World had just been more "Repton 3" levels with the same character sets, this would have made it plain boring. I only make the point to make it clear that all those new designs do have a (small) effect on the playability of the game. I think the effect is restricted to those gamers who just want to solve the actual puzzles rather than marvel at the imagination of its authors.

And... there's not really a lot more to say. Repton games from Repton 3 to Repton 6 are all pretty much of a muchness. I like Around The World because its level sets aren't crazily difficult, and there aren't so many rules to follow that you get as confused as you do playing Repton: The Lost Realms. There's a charm to its packaging too, with Repton having become a tempestuous, cute-alien-looking bug-eyed character who, on the packaging, seems to be having the time of his life. The original physical version featured a free Repton badge too. Make sure it's included when you track it down, and expect to pay around £3-£4.