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A group of fanatics are undermining society by changing the distant past, and they've summoned forth a monstrous primaeval entity to do their work.

Only a crack agent from the elite Time Corps can outwit them, by travelling back into the past and battling the entity wherever it can be found.

Ring any bells? Well, it's a plot not a million years removed from that of Virgin's inept Falcon: The Renegade Lord, but whereas Falcon was a witless ragbag of worn-out arcade sequences, Hysteria is a minor masterpiece of animated graphics and timing.

In each time zone there are certain hostile characters and objects which, when destroyed, leave behind a lemon or a jigsaw piece. The lemons allow the on-screen weapon icons to be accessed, so that lightning bolts or energy arrows can be selected, or even a jet pack. The jigsaw pieces are collected until the portrait of one of the evil fanatics is completed, whereupon the entity is forced to appear and engage the Time Agent in a bloody battle to the finish. If the entity is defeated, then the scene shifts to the next time zone, and the whole thing starts again.

Software Projects don't waste much time explaining all this, and before you know it you've been transported back to Ancient Greece, dropped amongst the temples and statues, and your muscle-bound figure is being beseiged on both sides by rampant centaurs and dagger-wielding skeletons which erupt from the stony ground.

Programmers Tony Pomfret and Karan 'Art' Davies (ex-Denton Designs) have employed a sophisticated form of parallax scrolling, so that as your He-man type figure runs to left or right, the background scenery scrolls at a slower rate than objects in the foreground. All the sprites, whether galloping horses, harpies or dragons, are minutely and effectively animated, and the entity, when it finally appears, is a grotesque lump of throbbing gristle.

While you're busy fighting off the nasties at ground level, you've also got to shoot at the hunched harpies and busts which decorate the tops of buildings and pillars, so that you can pick up the lemons and puzzle segments. But some are so high that you'll need to use the jet-pack, while others can be knocked off their perches by the revolving rocks which spin around your head whenever the 'dog' icon is selected.

If you're going to succeed at all, then you're going to have to be very quick on the draw. Put up your shield when all else fails, conserve as much energy as possible, and at all times plan your moves. It's essential that when the entity materialises you're armed with energy arrows at least, and ideally a jet-pack as well.

Level two, set in some sort of medieval locations, is more of the same, with archers and dragons combining forces with the mythological beasts from level one.

Three levels might not seem like very many, but it's certainly enough for most gamesters, and probably more than enough for some. And the programming team have added lots of slick techniques, including an impressive hi-score routine and a tasteful death scene, in which your warrior explodes into giant, bouncing soap bubbles. Plus there's nifty music and good, reverberating sound effects.

Hysteria is an extremely polished variation on what is really a very old theme. It proves that you don't need 125 levels to make a game challenging. A mere three will do if the difficulty factor has been set right.