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America is a strange and scary place. In US Gold's vision of the future you are a member of the CyberPolice and your aim is to make it to the elite corps of headbangers - the Enhanced SWAT team. E-Swats get to play with cybernetic exo-suits featuring duo laser-cannons. They also get the opportunity to say things like "Your move, creep" without looking totally out-of-character.

First you must prove to your superiors that you are of the right stuff by dealing with three gangland bosses. If you successfully make your way through the mean city streets, you get to meet these toughies in the flesh. Pop them off and your Chief rewards you with a promotional shoulder-stripe (But no pay-rise, of course!). Beat all three and you get to put on the cling-film suit and look cool.

In perhaps the worst example of a hackneyed game format, you get all kinds of nasty to deal with. The first is the poor animation: you are a kind of Pink Panther with a groin rash, unable to move your back leg past your front knee for fear of a devilsome chafe. Then you discover your next problem: your state-of-the-art, hi-tech weaponry is really a potato-popping spud-gun. Strictly one bullet on screen per week, chaps. We don't want to overdo it!

As if that isn't enough, you can even fire backwards without turning round - a feat that I thought only Clint Eastwood could carry off. A quick twist of the joystick fools the animation routine so it launches a bullet from the back of your neck, without printing your updated position.

You must be joking! There is nothing new, exciting or even remotely out of the ordinary in E-Swat's graphics department. The sprites are poor and the animation is even worse.

Sound is such an irregular visitor to the game that it barely registers: it consists of only a click or duck-fart every ten seconds. The intro music resembles a badly played rendition of the Inspector Gadget theme tune, but it's possibly the most solid part of the whole game.

Leave it alone, unless you're never played a scrolly beat-'em-up before - in which case you'd never know the difference. This one is guaranteed to provide five minutes of entertainment before you fall asleep.

E-Swat is actually an anagram of Waste, which is a fitting coincidence. Is it your time or your money that's being wasted? Is it both? I think we should be told.