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"A totally nail-biting, multi-dimensional, hi-resolution Awesome Arcade Adventure!" And all that for just £1.99. Actually, Universal Hero isn't quite as wonderful as the tongue-in-cheek hype suggests, but it's still pretty nifty for a piece of budget software.

It seems that our Hero has just got seven seconds to save his planet, and in those seven seconds he's got to wander through a set of caverns and find the spare parts needed to repair his space shuttle, which will fly him to another planet where he has to collect the equipment needed to repair the out-of-control space freighter so that he can get back to earth in one piece.

Universal Hero is, as you might have guessed, a wander-round-the-caves-collect-the-objects-and-avoid-the-monsters type game, and though it's a little old fashioned. It is a highly polished and well designed example of the genre. And there's also a certain element of strategy thrown in as well, since some of the items that you have to locate can only be reached by solving puzzles. For instance, there is one cave entrance blocked by a pile of rubble and you've got to work out which objects can be used to start a rock slide and open up the entrance. Hero can carry up to nine objects in his pockets, so there's scope for some quite complex combinations of objects to be used.

As he makes his way through the game, Hero uses up oxygen from four cylinders and collision with some of the nasties in the caves drains his air supply, so you've also got to go looking for spare oxygen supplies to keep you going. For some reason, there are one or two monsters that just wipe out your entire supply in one go without any warning, and there's a lump of plutonium that has the same effect alhough again there's no warning that the object is actually plutonium. These things are a bit irritating as they make the game dependent on luck at some points, but once you've come across these traps once you can generally avoid them in future.

On the plus side there are some nice graphics and smooth animation, and the figure of Hero has a jaunty little walk as he strides through the caves. Thankfully, there is a define keys option, but it would have been a good idea if the cassette inlay had given a bit more information about the game.

Universal Hero isn't a flawless game, but it does have its good points, and, as always, Mastertronic are still giving more expensive games a run for their money.