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As the great Jane Austen once wrote - "I do not want people to be very agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal."

Such could well be the philosophy of your average samurai, and it's especially applicable in the case of the unfortunate chap featured in this game. After witnessing the death of his master (Lord Akira, cartoon apocalypse movie fans) and entire village at the hands of an evil wizard and barely surviving the attack himself, the young warrior enlists the aid of the gods and the wizard is banished to the far future. This isn't enough for the samurai, though, and he follows the murderer to the 21st century, hell-bent on revenge and prepared to slaughter anyone who gets in his way. Hey, did someone say the word 'slaughter'? Sounds like a cue for a computer game...

First Samurai (the title is a dig at System 3's Last Ninja series!), sees the player take on the not-unfamiliar guise of a muscle-bound bonehead with a grudge, with a mission to hack and slash his way through (in this case) ten levels of arcade adventure-style violence. The game structure is distinctly suggestive of Renegade's Gods with a touch of Gremlin's Switchblade 2 thrown in, and isn't really anything to get worked up about, but as you've undoubtedly already looked at the end of the review and noticed the huge mark, you'll be wanting to know what it is that distinguishes this game from the hundreds of bog-standard chop-'em-ups already in existence.

The answer is a simple one, and should be engraved in stone above the door of every software house in the country - "If you're going to do it, do it properly."

I don't know about you, but I'm sick to death of some of the half-arsed attempts at full-price professional games certain software houses expect the public to fork out upwards of £26 a time for. The over-riding theme seems to be far, far too often "oh, well, it's good enough," which is a myth perpetuated by sycophants and idiots in the magazine world who are old enough to know better. Mediocrity has been an accepted standard for too long - there's no such thing as "good enough". It's all or nothing as far as I'm concerned - either you've got the pride and integrity to work at a game until it's as near to perfect as it can feasily be, or you've got no business expecting it to sell a single copy. We see maybe 500 games a year at Amiga Power, and of those perhaps fifteen are truly worth paying the asking price for. First Samurai is one of them. Why? It's been done properly.

From the opening sequence to the final battle, this game drips quality. Beautiful graphics, huge levels, superb presentation, instinctive control, magnificent sound and above all, attention to detail. There are no sudden unexplained jumps between different worlds, no 'Loading Level Two' messages to wreck the atmosphere (there's practically no loading at all, as it happens, but I'll get to that in a minute), no cop-out reliance on invisible dangers. In fact, nothing at all to get in the way of the pure enjoyment of the game.

As I've said, there's nothing too out-of-the-ordinary in the game's design - it's an arcade adventure platform-leaping extravaganza in the same vein as many others. It's probably closest to Gods, but with the best elements of Switchblade 2 and Turrican thrown into the melting pot it eclipses the Bitmaps' hit effortlessly.

Really, this is the game which makes all those reviewers who went into fits of unrestrained ecstasy over the Renegade title look just a little bit ridiculous. For a start, First Samurai gives you ten worlds where Gods gave you four, and each of Samurai's levels is several times bigger than any of those in Gods. What's more, you get the first four levels in the first load, completely eliminating disk accessing for the first week or so of the average gamer's playing.

The other levels come in two blocks of three, each loaded in approximately three seconds while the between-levels bonus is calculated, making the whole business of accessing almost totally invisible.

Each level sets you the task of collecting a certain number of special items, but the levels all contain more of the items than you require, so you don't have to omplete any stage in a particular set way. Exploration is encouraged and rewarded, and indeed it's even possible to teleport back from a level to the previous one (with, of course, no penalty in hanging around for disk accesses) to search for yet more hidden points and bonuses, or just for the sheer hell of it. The levels come in three dramatically varying graphical styles, and the different areas are linked by two excellent little sub-game-type sections to ensure there's no loss of atmosphere. The graphics themselves are a league beyond Gods, bursting with colour and a distinctly console/arcade look, as opposed to Gods' dull blue/grey predominance and very 'computer game'-y feel.

Where First Samurai really leaves the other game behind, though, is in the field of sound. Hits on enemies are accopanied by dramatic orchestral stabs, the samurai's sword swishes ominously, there's the odd burst of speech, and best of all, when you open a chest or basket full of food or treasure, First Samurai erupts into the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel's 'Messiah'! The overall feel created by the soundtrack is a glorious, epic one, and it gives the game an atmosphere unlike any I've experienced.

Only using effects when something actually happens adds to the dramatic effect greatly, although it does have a small drawback in that when there *isn't* a lot going on the game is entirely silent. This is especially noticeable in the fifth level, where after the constant rumble of the train journey the city streets feel strangely subdued, but since moments where there isn't much happening are few and far between it's not a significant flaw. Certainly it's a small price to pay for such stunning sonics.

Okay, so it thrashes its closest competitor to within an inch of its life, but is First Samurai still a great game when taken on its own merits? (That's a rhetorical question, by the way). It isn't quite as technically excellent as, say, F1 Grand Prix, it doesn't have the simple idiot fun factor of Rodland, it lacks the depth of Cruise For A Corpse, it hasn't got - bloody hell, who cares? This game has been so beautifully and lovingly nurtured that it stands head and shoulders above 98 percent of Amiga games of any kind. It's a joy to play, there's enough of it and enough secrets hidden in it to keep you enthralled for weeks on end, and for once it's been programmed with the gameplayer and not the trainspotter in mind. It looks gorgeous, it sounds amazing, it calls for strategy, planning and careful thought as well as mindless hacking, and it rewards effort admirably with the aid of a unique-code-saving system similar to that employed in Gods (but one which works better).

There now follows a short summary for the benefit of the short-of-attention-span who always read the last line of a review first because they can't stand the tension. I like this game a lot.

Uppers: Gorgeous, original, considered use of sound, enormous playability, and a massive but fair challenge - no cheating with awkward control or stupidly tough enemies here. The game excels in almost every area, but the presentation in particular is really something special.

Downers: A tiny bit of extra speed wouldn't have hurt, but that's about it.

A breath of fresh air brought to a tired genre - one day all games will be written this way - then again, hell might freeze over first. A brilliant game, and an object lesson to programmers everywhere in - yes - How To Do It Properly.