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Developed over two years, this is one of a very small number of ice hockey games available, so Impulze are clearly hoping to clean up amongst the millions of ice-hockey-loving Amiga owners in Britain. (Er, do you think we should tell them...?) To this end they've produced a game with three levels of difficulty, seemingly based on the relative skills of some real-life international sides.

As well as the traditional one- or two-player modes and variable length of game, you can choose from several ways of deciding which of your players you control, and even how your team restructures itself to fill the gap when one of your players is sent to the sin bin. But, anyway, onto the actual game...

Oh dear. The game. This is where things start to go wrong, unfortunately. The match is played in a very strange perspective - almost an overhead view but slightly distorted to give a rather crap pseudo-3D effect. The ice element provides a good excuse for the players to slide around without moving their legs, so animation doesn't amount to much.

Sound doesn't feature to any significant extent at all, and as for playability, well, it would have been a good idea to have some.

Large parts of the game are spent skating up the rink with the puck, shooting at goal, missing, chasing the puck as it rebounds all the way back to the other end of the rink, then going the whole thing again. Passing is unnecessary and (with no overhead view scanner) largely impossible, shooting is largely a matter of guesswork, and tackling appears to be entirely at the whim of the computer.

Fouls result in long pauses while the referee holds on to the puck for an inexplicably extended period of time, and since practically every attempted tackle results in a foul this makes for an extremely stop-start kind of game. Joystick responses are confusing, and while the half-time highlights are a nice touch, they're really spitting in the wind.

Cheap and cheerful. Except, er, it's not cheap. You can buy Speedball 2 for the same price, and that makes it look like a very bad deal indeed.