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Good grief. The number of ST games that have been based around some poor love-stricken fool who wanders off through unfeasibly dangerous lands just to get his girlie back - is quite frightening, isn't it? A whole genre of games about brain-dead heroes who just don't realise *they're going to die - horribly*.

Any road, the hormone-spouting geezer here is called Leander and he's all agog for a girlie - well a princess actually - called Lucanna. But the poor young thing's been kidnapped, and on her 18th birthday, too. Kidnapped by who? International terrorists? A desperate bunch of guerillas? Nope, a dragon, Tranatos. Anyway, Leander gets all dewy-eyed and rushes off heroically - but very stupidly - to get his tottie back from the clutches of iniquity.

Leander is a platform game set over three large worlds with multitudes of sub-worlds. Each sub-world has a specific quest like recovering an object from one side of the level and then exiting through the teleport on the opposite side, so you visit every part of the level and its hidden nasties. There are lots of these: blue knights who swipe at you with pikes, green archers who arch at you, and horses pulling carts.

Bash open the chests scattered around and you can collect goodies, the least of which are coins, which you can use in the shops to buy good stuff like extra weapons and armour. Holding down the fire button increases the strength of some weapons. A full weapon blast is necessary to dispatch certain biggish enemies, like (gulp) Thanatos' Ethereal Presence or the Giant Otter (?). Leander's strength can also be increased. Every time he's hit he loses a hit point and changes colour. So if he's in the pink, he's not necessarily in the pink.

It's hard to see the attraction of most platform games. Most of them are huge mental-mapping exercises with repetitious and unchallenging gameplay. Leander isn't that much different, but at least it has some snazzy graphics. At the superficial level which platform games operate on, this is a definite bonus. The animation is fluid, the backgrounds are moody and the sprites are impressively sized.

Leander can't ever hope to compete with the long-term interest of a game like Legend. These sorts of games are fine for those console types who can't live without sight of a hard-to-get bonus for a week, but for the rest of us one platformer every six months, choose between Leander and Harlequin - they're both as good as each other.

1. Yes, more platform nonsense. Good sort of nonsense though.
2. Swishy graphics, for once, do make the game better than it would have been with Llamatron-style graphics.
3. But it's nothing to gawp at.