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Forget Kenner and Palitoy; Industrial Might and Logic are the toymakers to watch. Their bizarre factory produces a whole range of Lucasfilm toys, from R2-D2 to the Loom creatures. The assembly line begins with raw materials and finishes with the toys being packaged. There are machines to do everything, but on the night shift there's only one worker to correct mistakes: yours truly, either Fred or Fiona Fixit. If you earn enough money an intermission screen shows your worker buying goodies. But if you fail to meet toy quotas it's the sack!

The sprawling production line is informally known as the beast! It stretches over four screens, push-scrolling vertically. Raw materials are piped in at the top, where they need to be heated to the correct temperature in a massive glass flask. Use a match to light the Bunsen burner, then select the right setting. There's also a plug on the raw material feeder and a bolt on the resin mixer which tend to work loose. Once all this is working, blocks of plastic are sent down the line. There's countless conveyor belts, all of which must be moving in the right directions.

Along the way, the plastic blocks are punched into doll shapes, each doll coming in two halves. On later levels they need to be painted. You have to mix the right colour, as well as ensuring the paint sprays and drying fans are on. After being painted the dolls have to be put together - all too often legs are on top of heads, or two heads together! Then there's Quality Control, a bike to generate electricity and packing cases at the bottom.

All these elements make for a pretty sophisticated production line with a natural tendency to go wrong at almost every point. You have to scurry up and down the line correcting the faults, as well as being harassed by a lemming and an accountant who hits you over the head with some bills. This leaves you stunned for a few seconds, as does falling too far.

Naturally you have a toolbox; down and fire to access it with left/right scrolling through items such as a wrench, match, balloon (to go up the Beast quicker), umbrella (to go down quicker), vacuum cleaner (to suck up the lemming) and venus flytrap (to eat the lemming!). All of these items can only be used once, so you have to keep an eye out for more to collect.

The great thing about this game is how more and more factors are introduced with each new nightshift. Moreover you can never tell where faults are going to develop: each time you play a level it's a little bit different than the last time. Combined with a permanent high score table there's a big incentive for going back to the start to close up mega-earnings. But if you haven't got that long to play, you can use the fruit machine password system to go to whichever level you want.

The graphics are initially a little confusing, and also clearly betray their EGA PC origins with not much in the way of subtle shading. But unlike Loom, which cries out for Amiga graphics, this doesn't matter here. Sound is impressive with a great industrial soundtrack.

All in all, this is one of the most playable Amiga games this month.

This is one of the most compulsive games I've played in ages. There always seems to be something going wrong on the production line, so seeing properly finished dolls emerge is very satisfying (while the muddled-up rejects are often amusing - like C-3PO's head on R2-D2's body!).

It's all marvellously hectic fun with later levels adding even more machinery to juggle wirth. Thankfully, the password system avoids frustration, the only slight annoyance being the lengthy interlevel disk accessing.

The smart-looking C64 version will be reviewed next issue.

Presentation 83%
Level password system, animated reward scenes, save-to-disk high scores and production briefing. Lengthy disk accessing between levels.

Graphics 85%
An extremely complex production line somehow manages to be amusing, interesting and constantly changing. Characters are cute too!

Sound 79%
A variety of tunes, plus a continual industrial soundtrack.

Hookability 84%
Takes a little getting used to, but a demo and an easy level one soon get you hooked.

Lastability 92%
30 levels, introducing more and more new elements.

Overall 89%
Working in a toy factory really is as good as your kid brother dreams!