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Any game that promises a mixture of Monsters and Snapper, with the originality of driving a JCB earth-moving digger around an island, and written by Acornsoft, sounds like a real winner.

The screen display of JCB Digger is a window on part of the island's landscape and the JCB is in view at all times. The vehicle can be moved in the standard four directions - up/down, left/right. Viewed from the side, the JCB has two main moving parts, a shovel/hopper at the front that fills in holes and clears earth and other obstructions, and a mechanical digger arm at the rear. These movements can be controlled by two further keys or by joystick.

The aim of the game is to drive the JCB around the landscape, clearing it of various obstructions such as earth and trees (not a game for conservationists). There's one little problem, however. The meanies! These are circular floating monsters who, if they catch up with you, will push you out of the driving cab and drive the digger away. So, your task is to clear the landscape and kill the meanies. They can be killed by digging holes (though you are limited by the number you can dig) and hoping a monster falls in and then filling in the hole (surely this idea has been used before?). Or you can catch a monster on the front of the digger when the shovel is down and push it into the sea and drown it. You have three lives and with succeeding screens the monsters change colour and the difficulty level increases.

JCB Digger is supplied on cassette or disc and there are the usual options of a pause facility and turning the sound off - something you'll probably want to do quite quickly as the sound effects, though well-executed, become annoying especially as clearing a screen takes a long time.

I found JCB Digger disappointing for a number of reasons. First and foremost, the 'shudder' on the screen is irritating. Hardware screen scrolling is used in all directions, as there is a lot of landscape to get round, and when you move vertically the top and bottom lines of the screen flash and jump. If a monster catches you, the driver jumps out and the monster drives the digger off-screen. The problem is, an after-image of the driver stays in the cab.

The idea behind JCB Digger is novel, but in the final analysis lacks the punch of previous offerings from Acornsoft. The idea is not done justice by the screen display. Too much has been sacrificed to achieve a landscape scroll in all directions and the final product is not of the quality we have come to expect from Acornsoft and Jonathan Griffiths, who also wrote Snapper.

JCB Digger held little interest for me, though there might be some who will like it, purely for its new approach to chase-the-monster and eat-the-dots.