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Well, I've been playing the Cisco Heat coin-op which sits in pride of place beside the coffee machine to death ever since I won it for us a few weeks ago (only to have to give away to some undeserving wretch - er, lucky reader - but that's another story), so I'm just about the best-placed person there is to tell you how good a conversion of it this Image Works licence is. Oh dear...

Okay, so being nothing like it's parent coin-op doesn't necessarily mean something is a bad game per se. And indeed Cisco Heat isn't a bad game. The graphics are a bit small and a bit crude and the street layouts (supposedly accurate maps of the real San Francisco area) bear no resemblance to the arcade ones whatsoever after the first level (which itself has only a tenuous grip on the coin-op's first stage), but the essential nature of the manic driving experience remains unchanged. The hills and dips which are such a major part of the 'Frisco landscape are still there, and they work surprisingly well - you really do get that stomach-lurching feel as you fly over the top of a particularly steep incline. The speed - that other crucial prerequisite of the good racing game - is also of a more than acceptable level, but after that things start to go wrong...

First and foremost, the control system is absolutely horrible, Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge set the standard with its natural and friendly 'fire-button-to-accelerate' method, but Cisco Heat is stuck way back in the Dark Ages. The constant need to have the joystick wrenched foward to keep the car moving is stupid and unnecessary, and gets physically painful after a couple of games. Changing gear is accomplished by centring the stick and then moving it backwards and forwards with the fire button held down, believe it or not, and generally the control makes the game twice as hard and half as enjoyable to play as it should be.

Mind you, there could be a reason for it - like the coin-op, Amiga Cisco Heat features just five levels. While the arcade game was tough enough to make completing all five a pretty challenging long-term task, most halfway-decent players will finish this inside a day. Even if you don't the dullness (in terms of there being anything new or different to see) of the graphics in the later stages is unlikely to have you clamouring madly to get to the end. It's not just graphics either, the variations introduced towards the end of the coin-op to keep interest alive (like the option to take a different route at certain points) have been totally done away with, as has the lovely and dramatic double-decker bridge section. What's left is, frankly, nowhere nearly enough entertainment for your money.

A fun driving game that's fine as far as it goes, with the hills and junctions giving it a bit of originality, but the control system is abominable, it's not even slightly close to the coin-op and it's far too short to provide a decent amount of enjoyment for £26.