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A great film, a great licence and a great game. Spectrum programmer Mike Lamb followed up his brilliant RoboCop game design with Batman, and this time the C64 conversion outclassed the Speccy original. No less than five games in three loads made a good stab at recreating the movie's storyline.

Level One is set in the Axis chemical works where Batman 'creates' the Joker by dropping Jack Napier in acid. You start at one end of a sixty-screen maze of platforms, ladders, acid drops and boiling steam jets. Napier is at the other end, and to meet him you must battle through police and villains armed with either machine guns or gas bombs.

Of course, shoot-'em-up action crossed with platforms-and-ladders has featured in a host of Ocean games, from RoboCop to Navy SEALs to Total Recall, but Batman was one of the first and best, mainly because of the batrope. Swinging from platform to platform is great fun and mastering it is a key part of the game.

The next load includes two horizontally-scrolling sub-games, and the Mastermind-like puzzle section. It opens with the Batmobile zooming through Gothan en route to the Batcave. Speed is essential, and apart from dodging traffic some sharp 90 degree turns must be made into the screen using the batrope. Timing this is tricky and, if you miss a turn, you have to go back through oncoming traffic. Simplistic but good fun, similarly with the puzzle game. Finally, the Batmobile sub-game sees you hurtling down the high street, using your wingtips to cup ropes attached to poisonous balloons!

Load three uses the same game-style as level one but is set in a cathedral with the aim being to get to the top. It plays quite a bit differently and rounds off the game very nicely.

In the original review Stu praised the variety in "one of the year's best C64 games" while Robin raved about the "swinging rope effect" in a "wonderful package of action and adventure".

Over a year later, the game still stands out, the graphics are good and if not technically stunning, more than compensate in atmosphere and variety. Sonic accompaniment is great with a different tune for each level, and playability is very high.

Certainly neither Ocean nor anyone else has come close to matching its superb mix of varied sub-games and great sense of fun in a movie licence.