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Addictive games is best known for Football Manager - a game so intrinsically well designed that it has been converted to every machine under the sun and is still (several years later) the most successful management game ever. Although Addictive has released other games over the years none have had anything like the success of Manager. Now it hopes to change all that with Kirel.

Kirel looks, in its use of an edge-on 3D viewpoint, a little like Knight Lore and Alien 8. Were Kirel actually like those games it would of course be exceptionally tedious. Enough is enough. But despite the wizzo graphics you could argue that Kirel is barely an arcade game at all, or at least say that the skills it requires are quite different from the usual dodge, blast and collect, sweaty palmed instant reaction brigade. With Kirel you have to think, and think very fast.

Somewhere in its development Kirel was related to that ancient arcade game where you had to shunt a boot to a bomb - reaching it before it blew to bits. Kirel has the same basic idea, on each new screen you must get to and leap on, a bomb or several bombs, before time runs out and the biggest bomb of the lot expresses itself in the only way it knows how. In Kirel this all takes place in 3D and is made difficult not only by some nasty monsters that look like seaweed on a bad day but the mental torment of working out how to get where you want to go.

There are 70 screens. On each there are dozens of blocks arranged in all kinds of patterns. Getting to some of the bombs is going to involve manipulating the blocks, building block bridges and viewing the problem from several different angles (you can change viewpoint like Ant Attack).

This would be comparatively simple were it not for the fact that the Kirel character - a blob with two big eyes - can only 'climb' one step at a time, ie it cannot bounce on top of any block more than one block higher than the block on which it is standing.

Kirel can pick up the block it's standing on and drop down one level but if that then means there are no adjacent blocks one above, below or at the same level as Kirel you have achieved precisely nothing. Get the picture (if you do without re-reading the above several times you should do well at this game).

Kirel is pleasing to the eye, even though 3D screens don't have the 'gosh wow' impact they once had. I found the mixture of block structures and bizarre objects like the cheese gave the whole game a wonderfully surreal touch. Kirel and the monsters (a name for a group if ever I heard one) are very Ultimate-style wacky with amusing (if jerky) animation giving them some personality.

Addictive have faced the old Spectrum 'any colour you like so long as it doesn't move' attribute problem and like all sensible people waved the white flag - all the screens are two-colour only. Can't say I minded much though.

Sound is surprisingly effective, perhaps because it doesn't try to say anything other than squelch and burp at the appropriate moments. The squelches and burps are, however, most effective.

JUDGEMENT

I loved it. Addictive say the game has 'a lot of original ideas'. That's pushing it, but it certainly puts a lot of old ideas from other programs together in a new way. It has all the thrills of an arcade game whilst testing your reasoning far more than your trigger finger.

Skip Austin

Publisher: Addictive Games Price: £8.95 Memory: 48K

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