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With Jack The Nipper, Gremlin make a slight change of direction, away from the arcade action of their recent releases. I'm not quite sure how to describe this game - you can fire at things, and bounce around the screen, avoiding monsters and leaping over platforms made from items of furniture, but it's not a conventional arcade game (although it is similar, in some ways, to Mikro-Gen's Herbert's Dummy Run game).

You take on the role of Jack, a cute looking character who goes around creating as much havoc as Dennis the Menace. Jack is free to roam around town and sneak into all the shops and buildings that he comes across and it's your task to ensure that wherever he goes, he leaves a trail of chaos and destruction in his wake.

Scattered around town are a number of objects that Jack is just dying to get his grubby little mits on. There are pea-shooters, tubes of glue, sacks of fertiliser and other potentially lethal items all of which are just waiting to be used on potential victims. Inside his nappies Jack has room to hold two objects and these can be picked up or dropped whenever you want, but there are certain ways, or places, in which they can be used in order to create maximum disruption and score high marks on the 'Naughtyometer'. Your aim is to achieve the highest naughtiness percentage, though so far I've only managed to achieve a score of 12% and a rating of "Namby Pamby".

The games graphics are interesting - the display looks two-dimensional and by moving up/down you can simulate three dimensional movement into/out of the screen and this allows you to dodge around the characters and creatures that are wandering around and getting in our way. There is an assortment of the town's inhabitants, as well as ghosts, dogs and some funny-looking blob thingies. Contact with these isn't fatal, but it does give Jack nappy rash and when the 'Rashometer' goes past the danger level, Jack loses one of his lives. The only drawback here is that some of the sprites used for these characters can stick to Jack like glue regardless of how hard you try to dodge them and this can waste you a lot of lives in a short time.

Use of colour has been kept to a minimum to avoid attribute clashes, and this has allowed the programmers to draw some quite large and detailed figures for Jack and the townsfolk which help to give the game a bit of character. Jack's main weapon is a pea-shooter, with which he can tot up a score on the naughtyometer and it's fun watching the cute little sprite going around firing it at everyone he comes across. In fact, it's probably the novelty of the game, its theme and style of graphics, that make it as enjoyable as I found it. The instructions could be a little clearer as I found it a bit irritating to have to play for quite a long time before I began to see what I was supposed to be doing, but after a while I did start to find the game fun.

It's quite simple and enjoyable, though perhaps not quite up to the usual standard of Gremlin's games.