The old adage that many of the best ideas are the simplest, has never been truer than with this little gem from Infogrammes. As the title suggests, the game is set in New York in the 1930s. This was the era of prohibition when men were gangsters, booze was a no-no, and violin cases were never used to carry violins!

Your job is to clean up the neighbourhood by knocking off all the gangsters in the area. For this service you will be richly rewarded with piles of unmarked dollars. Gangsters may appear anywhere - peeping out from windows of all shapes and sises, on fire escapes, behind trash-cans, down dark alleys, even popping up out of manholes.

At the start of the game you see part of the neighbourhood (viewed from across the road), a four-storey terraced building with stairs leading up to the main entrance. Insert into the bottom right-hand corner of the screen is a counter. When a gangster appears, the counter ticks away the seconds from five down to zero. If you haven't located and shot the gangster by zero you're iced!

Sounds simple? Not so, because, almost every time a gangster rears his ugly head, the head in question is to be found off the screen, either above, below, or to the left or right, by moving your sights (controlled either by keyboard or mouse) say, to the right-hand edge of the screen, it will automatically scroll to the right, revealing the next part of the street.

So if a gangster is not visible on the screen, how do you know where he is. After all he's just about to turn you into a string vest so you should at least have an inkling as to his whereabouts.

Well, what happens is that an arrow appears pointing either to the left or right telling you which way you need to pan in order to see the wretch.

But the arrow doesn't tell you on what storey the blighter is perched, so you'll may still have to pan up or down before he swings into view. If no arrow appears when the clock starts counting down, then the gangster is already directly above or below you.

If you manage to get a gangster in your sights and let him have it, you'll see him crumple on the floor in a dead heap, or slump lifelessly over the windowsill. If you're too late, a series of staccato flashes followed by a blood-curdling scream or grunt.

For those rare moments of absolute panic, there is a 'yellow belly' (yb) feature where you can hide behind a wall for five seconds while still panning around desperately looking for a face with a gun. Unfortunately you can only use 'yb' a couple of times during each phase of the game.

Once you start to show your prowess with the trigger, things start to get a little trickier. Firstly, some of the gangsters now have women hostages held in front of them to shield their own bodies. The idea is to hit that part of the gangster's body still visible behind the woman. If you hit the woman by mistake, she's the one who collapses on the ground with a suitably agonising scream, and you lose a life for your bad shooting.

Prohibition has excellent graphics and digitised sound effects, super smooth four-way scrolling, is instantly playable, and almost impossible to put down.