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Kids! Don't you just ha - love them? The software companies apparently do - we've had a spate of games recently featuring mischievous little - er, sprogs, the most famous of which is, probably, Brat.

Magic Pockets features a sprog, too - one called the Bitmap Kid. This Kid has lost all his favourite toys in the depths of his less-than-ordinary pockets, which isn't surprising when you consider how large they are. The only way to get them back is to enter the pockets themselves (the contortions don't bear thinking about) and find the damn things.

What all this amounts to is a platform game played over four worlds - a cave, a jungle, a lake and a mountain - each with at least five levels. Every level has the ultimate aim of finding a particular toy and leaving with it (although it's not absolutely necessary to get the toy to leave). Along the way you encounter the denizens of the Kid's pockets, none of them eager to help you - quite the opposite: they eat your sweets, get in your way, attack you and even steal your precious toys for themselves.

Of course, you do have a weapon to get rid of these monsters, which varies from world to world. In general, the longer you hold down the Fire button, the bigger your shot becomes. You can use these large shots to go into a tumble, which sends the Kid whizzing around the screen. While he's in a tumble, the Kid is invincible and instantly kills anything in its path. It's possible to trap monsters in the largest shot of the current weapon. If you jump into such a monster then you're rewarded with either a power-up or bonus sweets; the harder you hit it the more sweets you get, so it's a good idea to tumble into one if you can manage it.

Magic Pockets has a complex bonus system. For every monster you kill, the value of the sweets you get from a trapped monster increases, until you reach the next 5,000 points; then you get power-ups instead of sweets, which also increase in power as you kill more monsters. These power-ups range from a milk bottle, which gives you an extra life, to a Speedball helmet which not only makes you invulnerable but kills everything you touch. With a bit of luck and skill you can choose how you're going to play your game by collecting the appropriate power-ups.

All this bounding about is accompanied by some nifty graphics in the distinctive and detailed Mark Coleman style. The Kid is suitably chubby and very streetwise, with his baseball cap and trainers, while most of the monsters look completely fed up. Everything's nicely animated, though some of the effects look as if they've been taken straight from Gods. The audio effects are unfortunately sound chip stuff only, though they fit the arcade atmosphere nicely and aren't too intrusive. The touted Betty Boo soundtrack was created with TCB Tracker and is surprisingly good, though of course it's only heard at the beginning of the game.

Just when you think the platform genre has gone green and is starting to smell a little strange, up pops another game to prove you wrong. Magic Pockets is, after all, just another platform game, but its style and execution are absolutely wonderful. The Bitmaps have included enough small details, incentives, power-ups and complexity of play to keep you interested for a very long time - and just when you do start getting bored, you reach the next world and everything changes. Most of all, the game is great fun to play - you can be at it for hours and still discover new details and features.

However critical you may be, you can never find much wrong with a Bitmap Brothers game, because they always manage to deliver the goods. With Magic Pockets, they've come up with their best game yet.

1. Similar to Gods, but much more light-hearted and not quite as difficult
2. Bonus systems are as old as the hills, but none have been quite as involved or useful as this one
3. The best platform game since Switchblade 2