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Unless you've been living under a rock for the past three decades, it will take precisely two seconds for you to realise what game has inspired Espitene upon starting it up! Yes, we are well and truly into spiky blue hedgehog fan game territory here, however, instead of scrolling at speed we seem to have a flick screen setup, which is an interesting choice for a high speed platformer I must say.

The plot concerns itself with a girl named Cheril who finds an old costume in a junkyard that looks suspiciously like a pink version of the spiky blue hero (research indicates this is based on Espinete, a hedgehog character from the Spanish version of Sesame Street). Upon putting the costume on she 'knows what she must do', which apparently is to play through a parody of 8-bit Sonic, complete with silly level names like 'Benny Hill Zone' and a boss that looks suspiciously like Mario.

In terms of presentation the game is pretty good, with visuals and character designs that closely mimic the source material, and the game features music and sound effects that evoke a similar feel without being complete re-treads. The game also plays pretty similarly to its inspiration – roll into a ball to damage enemies, collect rings, sorry 'ringos' to protect you - it even has similar stage designs complete with hidden gems to find.

However, being a flick-screen platformer is at odds with the characters speed, and compounding matters are the somewhat slippery controls and iffy collision detection that can result in many unfair deaths. As a fan game Espitene is quite impressive, but thanks to frustrating gameplay elements, it just falls short of greatness.