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Fancy going out for a bit tonight? You will once you've got your fangs into Night Hunter, the game for groovy ghoulies.

In this French horror fantasy epic, Drac's back and you're the blood-sucking beastie yourself. Everyone else is out for the Count - witches , spiders, mummies, all sorts of ghoulies. Your task is to keep your bloodcount up long enough to take over the local village. Fortunately Dracula Towers boasts an endless supply of wandering virgins (in start contrast to EMAP Towers), and once you spot one all you have to do is grab 'em, put the bit on 'em and leave a tidy pile of bones on the ancestral carpet. The animation in these sequences is great.

Drac can climb stairs and duck under attacks from broomstick-mounted witches. To add to the bloody fun, you can also transform yourself into two other forms with a twist of the joystick. As a towering werewolf you can take on the mummies and other more powerful monsters, battering them with the old one-two of your hairy fists until the collapse. As a bat, you can flutter through the air avoiding the deadly swamps and pitfalls, and make your way into otherwise inaccessible parts of the castle. Three counters at the bottom of the screen indicate how long you can remain in each form before you need a recharge of the red cells.

There are, as you would expect, keys to be found in order to open some of the doors some of these are hidden in such a way that you need to be in the correct form to find them. There are also parchments which give you clues to the location of other treasures.

Animation is good throughout, though the flipping between screens is a bit slow. The background graphics are great too - monochrome but finely detailed, showing the towers, staircases, dungeons and battlements of the castle. Flickering torches, suits of armour, manacles, cobwebs and decorated doorways add to the spooky atmosphere, and little touches like scuttling mice complete the eerie ambience.

It's a case of fangs for the memory and all the other awful puns you can think of, but I'd stake my life Night Hunter is going to be a hit.

Label: Ubisoft Price: £8.99 Reviewer: Chris Jenkins

Drac's back and that's a fact! Fun and frolics with lots of atmosphere.