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Mikro-Gen's latest is a little disappointing, I'm afraid. At first it looks like a colourful arcade adventure in the style of Nodes Of Yesod, Starquake and so on, in which you have to trek through underground caverns searching for various objects.

Graphically it's nice enough, bright colours and smooth animation, but after playing the game for a short while you reliase that it's one of those games that allows you very little margin for error - and can be enormously irritating.

There's an element of novelty in the fact that you control a worm-like creature called a Kreezer, and instead of the usual left/right and flying movements that are standing in these sort of games, the Kreezer moves along with a sideways end-over-end movement... He can also jump, but this action is limited to jumping straight up with only a very limited ability to move or right as he comes back down again. This means that getting past most of the traps and monsters requires enormous accuracy in positioning and timing and at times the whole thing becomes an annoyingly frustrating matter of trial and error as you attempt to work out the correct manoeuvre.

The Kreezer's task is to rescue five other Kreezers who are locked up in different levels of the caves. But whereas in other games of this type, the caves are often interconnected in a complex pattern which allows many different routes through them, in Frost Byte the caves of each level seem to be connected in a fixed sequence so that in order to master the later obstacles you have to go through the earlier stages over and over again, and this soon becomes a bit of a chore.

It's a shame, because there's an enjoyable game in here, but it's been spoiled by not being very well thought out.