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It is Dick Decker's first day working as a despatch rider, collecting mail from letter boxes. He must keep the job if he is to marry his fiancee, the lovely Debbie. Poor Dick, however, encounters many obstacles during the course of his work.

These obstacles take many forms, not all of them recognisable. They include walls, traffic cones and water. Strangely, contact with any of these means instant death. Dick must also take care not to forget to pick up the mail, which is located in seven mail boxes.

The boxes split the game into seven parts, each part being completed when Dick reaches a mail box. If Dick dies at any stage, he is returned to the last mail box he visited. Another problem our hero faces is that his trusty steed, a Yamasaki 750, has a leaky fuel tank. He can get extra petrol by riding over fuel squares. If Dick manages to collect the mail from the mailboxes without losing all of his seven lives, he then has the second post to deal with.

My first impression of this game when I loaded it was not very favourable. Its title pages are dreary, unimaginative and almost illegible. Once into the game itself there was little to change my initial opinion. I found the hideously-coloured graphics unspectacular and the use of sound half-hearted. Dick did not respond well to my keyboard promptings - the keyboard is unresponsive with no auto-repeat. Constantly returning to the beginning of the stage whenever you die (which happened very frequently when I first started playing), quickly became tiresome.

That said, I did quite enjoy playing the game. It's a simple idea, adequately done. The graphics aren't much, but they do scroll very nicely. Despatch Rider won't be a best seller and it's not a game that will keep you amused for hours on end, as the sleeve notes claim. It is, however, one of those games which you may well find yourself playing for the odd half hour in a few months' time. All in all: passable, but could do better.

Michael Horend