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Fancy a bit of a battle, ninja style? Then pull on your groovy black ninja gear and get down to The Reaper! Every five hundred years, a group of immortal wisemen take a look back through history at all the valiant warriors who have lived and died. They choose one of these heroes and bring his body back to life to test his abilities and make sure his reputation is not exaggerated.

You're the chosen one and your task is to save the souls of your friends from the deadly maze inhabited by their worst enemies. Should you succeed, you'll be brought back to life for good - but fail and you and your friends will be damned for all eternity.

The landscapes in The Reaper are large and packed full of ninjas, killer robots, dragons and other, similarly nasty things. Your only tasks are to kill the ninjas that crop up and save the souls of your friends. To achieve this, collecting objects is the order of the day.

Keys open doors to other levels, a monitor allows you to keep track of your character's status and a cross increases health. The most important object to find is the soul trap: without it, you can't save your friends.

Disposal of the undead ninjas can be achieved with well-placed kicks. Alternatively, you can collect shurikens to pop them oft. no trouble at all.

Visually, The Reaper is pretty pathetic. The tiny matchstick ninjas are laughable when they dance and prance about the screeen. What's worse is the fact that [lowers voice to a whlspelr] there's a lot of swearing in it. You can choose a 'speech bubble' option, which arms your character with a variety of obscene language to use against his enemies. Very obscene language. Luckily', there's a clean version of 'the game included for the easily offended.

The Reaper is a very amateurish effort, especially with the pathetic swearing routines. There's no lastability: after a few minutes you'll get fed up with marching about saving souls.

NICK ... 41%

'After Ubi Soft's brilliant Night Hunter and the okay-ish Pick and Pile comes the totally naff The Reaper. The game begins with a fairly decent title tune, but the whole thing slides rapidly downhill when the small stickman sprites appear on screen. If the gameplay wasn't so crude they might have been funny, but it's as shallow as my patience (ie: very shallow indeed).