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Skweek is commonly spelt Squeak and refers to making a high-pitched sound, usually a loud short cry that is derived from seeing a mouse or something odd and unusual. Well odd and unusual describes the Amstrad CPC game of Skweek perfectly.

Skweek is a pint sized character, the cutest ball of yellow fluff you've ever seen and he is in deep trouble. You have to help him or his whole planet of skweeks will not survive.

Your task is to eradicate the blue skweekicide that contaminated his planet by evil aliens and to do this you need to change all ninety-nine continents of the skweek planet from blue back to its original colour by painting everything pink.

Ninety-nine continents? Are you serious? That's a huge number of levels for a game like this one. The skweek continents or levels are made up of contaminated blue tiles with some obstacles and all sorts of hazards in the way. To turn the tiles from blue to pink you have to move skweek in the direction you want to go and the tiles will turn back to pink. Sounds really simple but the game is much more challenging than that.

Level one is fairly easy but as you progress the game becomes much harder, the levels more challenging, the hazards and monsters more demanding. There is help in the form of bonus tiles that help you get the better of the monsters and hazards but its not all plain sailing when you get a bonus.

Painting is supposed to be boring, mundane and unadventurous but with skweek you get a painting job that tests your joystick stamina and mental abilities.

AA gave this an overall of 82% and it's easy to see why. The gameplay is so cool and it's one of those cute games everyone will fall in love with, probably turn a few hardened criminals for a brief moment or two with its cuteness.

Graphically Skweek is so colourful, I never liked the colour pink until now. A flurry blob of yellow and some well drawn tiles and monsters aren't going to win any graphics awards, yet they are nice and contrast well. The animation is smooth, play is very easy and there doesn't seem to be much slowness in game, which makes for good playing.

The CPC version of Skweek has a flip screen approach, where as the Atari ST version had a vertically scrolling world. I think I prefer the CPC version, but it can make seeing monsters or hazards a little tough going. There are loads of tiles on each level to paint so you'll be hooked and your mind won't get bored too easily either, especially with the fantastic soundtracks that you can choose while playing.

It's such a simple game design and I think only the French could have made it to be so much fun and crazily addictive to play.

Complete level one.

Graphics 70%
But so colourful.

Sound 80%
Just awesome.

Grab Factor 87%
You will be hooked from the start.

Staying Power 92%
99 levels so don't think you will finish this one.

Overall 87%
Original and fun.