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Kinetik is a world where the laws of motion have gone totally bananas. Gravitational forces are exerted every which way, nothing moves as it should, and avoiding objects is virtually impossible.

Into this chaos descends your spherical hydro-craft, on a mission to discover the three letters which make up the Word of Peace, deliver them into the hands of the local big cheese - the Great Kinemator - who will then exercise his control over the forces of the Cosmos.

Which is a pretty lame excuse for a storyline, but then that's nothing new in the crazy world of computer games.

The landscape into which you fall is one of weird plants and bushes outlined against the traditional black background. Later screens have some peculiar pods, turret and pipes, and there are some subterranean caves. So far, so unoriginal.

The population is fairly low down the evolutionary ladder, consisting of worms called Gwerms and amoebas called Starmoedbas. There are some mechanical thingies which also have silly names, but they're no more intelligent than the rest of the crew. All of them are hungry for power, and will drain it from the hydro-craft at the slightest touch.

The foilage isn't very friendly either - there are some spikey pink plants which are absolutely lethal, and some innocent-looking yellow flowers which attract you like magnets.

Your hydro-craft bounces uncontrollably though - or mostly into - all this, ricocheting off rocks and shrubs, pulled onto some plants and repelled by others, as you yank your joystick out of its casing trying to get the craft to move where you wan tit. Just about everything affects its motion, and all you can hope to do is influence it by tugging your stick in the right direction.

Sometimes the trick is to just keep moving, letting the hydro-craft's momentum carry it through the various hazards. At other times you'll have to get it bouncing higher and higher before it will clear an exceptionally nasty bloom. Worst of all are the screens where little white blobs pull the craft into orbit around them, and to break away you have to rebound off a far wall of vegetation at such speed that it will thrust you right across the screen and into the next.

Most of the time, however, your journey terminates, again and again and again, on one of those spikey pink leaves.

Scattered around the 43 zones of the planet are weapons and shields which should make things slightly easier.

There's also a teleport system, which is ridiculously difficult to get to. This will allow you to visit other screens, providing you can set up the correct symbol code. It operates once only.

It should be clear by now that what we have here, underneath all the mumbo-jumbo about kinetics and the Great K, is a standard arcade adventure where you trundle around a vertical maze of shrubberies and vague sci-fi structures, looking for goodies and avoiding baddies.

It reminds me a lot of Addictive Games' Arac, which also had a bouncing machine exploring similar scenery. There's one important difference, though. I enjoyed playing Arac.