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You talk to the animals, kick people in the head and run around in a loincloth. What a barbarian, eh?

You are the chosen one, the Sleeping Guardian sought out by the mind of the All-Seeing hawk. Unfortunately this doesn't involve huge supplies of fudge ice-cream, the company of supple women and everybody going about saying what a truly special and wonderful person you are. It involves doing battle with the forces of darkness and getting knocked about a lot. Life's like that sometimes; just when you thought people had suddenly realised that you were right all these years, it turns out they just wanted a favour.

Beastlord is a mix of arcade and a puzzly sort of adventure - you have to figure how to find and defeat the big baddie at the end. You run left and right along the scrolling screen searching for items and avoiding too much trouble. You can jump, kick and punch using your joystick as well as use the menu to control the more adventurous stuff like collecting and using objects.

Rather than just fighting your way to the end you have to solve a series of puzzles involving spells, objects and animals. You can talk to animals, you see. In fact, that's vital if you're going to get anywhere.

The graphics are colourful and pretty, although they're not the best drawn of sprites they are more than passable. The sound isn't, however, apart from an amusing slapping sound when you catch someone on the chin it's fairly fire during the rest of the game. Annoyingly you have to swap disks to see your death sequence before starting a game again, slowing things down a lot.

Although the mix of beat-'em-up and puzzle solving is refreshing, especially the talking to the animals bit, the game turns out to be dull, largely because the character you play spends so long getting from one place to another. You spend great chunks of the game watching yourself running in slow motion from one end of a level to the other. It's easy to screw things up, too. Punch the wrong person, lose an important animal or object and that's you stuffed. It's back to the last saved position to start again.

Beastlord is likely to suit you if you're a meticulous games-player but if you crave great rushes of adrenaline or convoluted plots and conundrums you're just not going to find 'em here. The game plods along in a careful but tedious sort of way.

1. A sizeable playing area and some pretty graphics.
2. You get to talk to squirrels.

1. The pace of the game is very slow, you run as if through treacle. It's easy to get it wrong and be unable to complete a section without starting again.