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Atlantis aren't a company that you hear a lot about, but they've been producing budget games for quite a while now and haven't been gobbled up by any of the larger software houses, so presumably they're doing OK.

Jock And The Time Rings, one of their latest releases, is an old-fashioned maze game in which you have to collect a number of objects to complete the game. Jock, a robot-looking like R2D2 on an off day, has gotten lost in time and the only way he can return to his own time is to collect 32 time rings from each of three time zones. After entering the first zone, the only way to get into the next zones is to find all the objects and gain a password, but the rings are protected by The Guardian Of The Rings who turns out to be a collection of deadly sprites patrolling the maze.

Obviously, colliding with any of the Guardian's sprites will cause you to lose a life, but in addition, as Jock enters each section of the maze, the ring in that section starts to become unstable, giving off radiation that will kill him if he doesn't collect the ring within the same time limit.

Graphically, the game looks rather old fashioned - the maze is made up of large, chunky bits of brickwork and the size of the bricks means that each section of the maze has to be kept fairly simple. Jock and all the other sprites are large and quite smoothly animated, though none of them move terribly quickly, so this isn't a game that is likely to generate any frantic action. The main problem is working out how to get to all the rings because, though the individual screens appear quite simple, many of the rings seem inaccessible unless you've got a good idea of the layout of the whole zone.

I can't say that this game exactly enthralled me, but for £1.99 it's a reasonable, if rather dated, game.