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Things have taken a turn for the worse on the planet Blot. Its inhabitants have suddenly woken up to the fact that being called a Blotian is incredibly unhip. They construct a spaceship, rename themselves the Fuzzy Wuzzies and crash land on a deserted island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

The Fuzzy Wuzzies are the cutesy stars of yet another platform game populated with goodies, baddies and machines that go "Grrrr." You see, the Fuzzies's island is also inhabited by a bunch of nasty Devils who capture the tragically hip creatures and cart them off to their gloomy sanctuary for a spot of animal experiementation. You play Clude Radcliffe - the lovable hungover hero - who has to traipse across six perilous baddie-packed levels looking for his missing pals.

As you make your way across every platform-saturated landscape you have to collect as many Magic Potion Creatures (MPCs) as you can. The MPCs come in useful later because you can trade them on the shop levels for eight special weapons - like the Curly Wurly, Scatterball and the Super Droopy - which make zapping alien nasties much easier. You also have a very special weapon of your own which you've made from a mixture of rotting shish kebabs, diced carrots and cheap lager. It's your breath. In fact, your gob stinks so much it catches fire every time you open it. With these tools at your disposal, getting your pals back should be a cinch, but, of course, it isn't.

The first thing you realise when you play Creatures is that it takes an inordinately long time to kill something. Even the nasties at the start of the game take a few shots of your Drooper or dragon-breath before they disappear in a plume of smoke. What's worse is that some baddies are indestructible anyway and you lose plenty of lives trying to get past them. Why? Because Clyde rushes about with all the speed of a snail on his day off, while your opponents home in on you like cruise missiles. Even when you think you've got a chance of sneaking past, the gaps are usually so narrow you're lucky if you scrape through with your five lives intact. The other thing you notice is that to get from platform to platform your positioning has to be frustratingly exact, even to the point where Clyde has to hang precariously in the air before you can make a move.

Creatures is controlled entirely by joystick with the usual twiddling to get Clyde to move left, right, up or down. You get to your special weapons by pulling down on the joystick while pressing the Fire button, just holding down Fire unleashes Clyde's stinky breath. Unfortunately, moving Clyde around isn't that easy as the controls are a bit vague.

Graphically, the game's packed with plenty of colourful, cutesy sprites, although the backgrounds are a bit samey and - because the whole thing's a horizontally-scrolling affair - it can get a bit monotonous. The sound effects are also pretty ropey with your weapons sounding more like a malfunctioning tennis ball machine, than the tools of death they are. As for the music, well, it just sounds like an Erasure B-side to us.

Creatures starts off promisingly enough, but ultimately fails to deliver. The colourful graphics and sick humour fail to disguise the fact that this is a very average platform game with appallingly slow gameplay. There's enough here to keep you going for a couple of hours, but Creatures has precious little long-term interest.

1. Creatures has some great graphics and a wonderful sick sense of humour.

1. ...but it's also incredibly slow and gameplay is frustratingly unforgiving.