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At first sight, Ice Hunter looks like just another multi-level mining game but it contains some pleasant surprises.

The hero of this program is Thorak, who looks like a monk with a big nose, but is in fact the Prince of Ice. He wants to build up his igloo home by adding more blocks of ice. To do this he must be guided around a five level ice cavern in an attempt to move one or more ice blocks into the sea at the bottom right of the screen.

So starting in the cavern he picks up the ice blocks, and carries them about on the end of his nose!

To move the blocks to another level he must drop them through patches of thin ice. These patches can be walked on as well but only once.

There are three kinds of monsters for Thorak to contend with: dragons, mutant sea-lions (which look like mice on their hind legs) and birds which fly across the ice levels.

These adversaries can be killed by dropping ice blocks on them or by eating a power pill, which appears from time to time and temporarily makes them vulnerable to being stomped on.

Thorak himself gets from layer to layer by means of ice pillars, but once he descends to the fourth level there is no way to return to the upper caves.

Once you have got an ice block into the water you can step on it and press the fire button to finish the level. Then Thorak floats off to his igloo and a bonus of 1,000 per ice block, to the strains of Whistling Dixie.

On subsequent screens the ice floors scroll across the screen and more monsters appear to plague you.

Although there is nothing particularly new about the ideas in this game it has been well put together and should be able to hold your interest.