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Yet another interesting budget game from Mastertronic. In this, your task is to collect a number of gems in order to persuade the Gods of Zzarn to return you to your home. But before you can acquire the gems you will need to gain special powers by collecting the effigies that are scattered around the sixteen sets of chambers that make up the game's playing area.

As you gather together the various effigies, you will be set upon by 'devils' that look remarkably like androids (and make me wonder who wrote the cassette notes, especially as they tell you the wrong keyboard controls!). If the devils catch you they wil take the effigy from you and return it to its resting place, but if you lose an effigy three times the gods slap your wrists by taking some of your powers and one of your lives too.

The sets of chambers are all separate, and the only connection between them is via the teleport chambers, but these will only work if you've collected the right effigies.

The screen display uses the outer section to display your lives left, crystals collected and so on, while the actual playing area is shown in a square inside this border. The graphics are relatively simple, with the passages and chambers drawn in quite large blocky graphics. These would be perfectly ok if the scrolling were a bit smoother, but as it is the jerky scrolling gave me quite an eyestrain, as did the rather distracting moving stripe all around the border of the playing area.

Still, ruptured eyeballs side, Lap Of The Gods is quite playable. It's one of those games that is simple and fairly repetitive but which draws you back for one more try to see if you can collect a complete set of effigies and move on to the next set of chambers.

There is a 'fire' button, but this only pulls down a menu which displays the options and powers available to you (where would Mastertronic games be without a pull-down menu, eh?). It would have helped the game's playability if you were also able to fire at the 'devils' as they come at you. As it is, you're more or less at their mercy as they move faster than your own figure and can't really be easily avoided.

Lap Of The Gods probably isn't the game for fast reaction arcade freaks, but if you've got a bit of patience, determination and £1.99 to spare you might want to give it a go.