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For a Marble Madness clone, Magnetron gets about as far away as you can from the rolling along ramps formula as is possible. In fact, it's gone for a new improved formula. Not just substituting marble for droid and roll for hover, it's made two innovations: it won't let you fall off, and it's introduced grappling. This, to me, is revolutionary thinking of the highest order.

Anyway, Magnetron is as good a game as I've seen this year no matter how much it owes to those who strove before.

The scenario goes something like this. You are in control of a droid, placed on one of eight satellite space stations. Each space station contains four reactors which you must turn off. Your mission is complete when all eight stations are powerless - so to speak. Only when you've turned off all the reactors on a station can you beam to the next one. You'll know when they're all off because all the lights go out. Clever, eh?

To add spice to this imaginatively lethargic storyline, all kinds of things have been introduced, notably grappling guard droids, and various interlude screens - more about those later.

You can simply zap guard droids with whatever weapon is allocated to you on that particular station. Or you can grapple with them. Why grapple if you can zap? Because successfully grappling replenishes your energy, and even more successful grappling creates a clone of yourself (sometimes known as an extra life).

It works like this. When you grapple with a droid, the grapple screen appears which features one of those 3 x 3 puzzle squares. Since droids are set to self-destruct whenever they grapple, you must get three bombs (not lemons) on the bottom line of the puzzle to deactivate the droid's detonator, thereby giving yourself more energy. Get the middle and top rows right too, and you create a clone of the droid for your own use.

The only trouble with all this is the time limit, which is about as long as the laugh you get from a Little and Large joke. Needless to say, the droids get tougher as you move to higher stations. But one good point is that you don't seem to get zapped that easily. None of this 'back to the start' stuff here.

That's the grappling finished with. Now for turning off reactors. This works in a similar way, calling up the reactor screen whenever you hover above the appropriate spot. The reactor has four fuel rods which you must play about with until the low-pitched drone goes down and eventually fizzles out. You can also see when the reactor is off because the spark between the two terminals goes out. What you've done, according to the blurb, is removed a fuel rod which you then carry around with you ready for the next reactor.

But the fuel rod you're carrying affects your performance. The heavier it is (weight is indicated by the left-side meter) the slower you go up a ramp. Its charge, both positive and negative (indicated by the right-side meter) also affects movement. Parts of the causeways have arrows on them and depending on which way you're charged, you're either pushed in the direction of the arrows or repelled.

Also dotted around are computer screens which you can access to give you droid information and the status of all the reactors on the station.

Only when all the reactors are off, an you go to one of the "beamer" squares to be transported to the next station. There are usually between two and three beamer squares per station and it's wise to make a map as you go to help you find your way back. That won't be too difficult because stations are relatively small, ranging from eight (the first) to sixteen (the last) screens.

Your droid is a pretty slick piece of work. It looks a little like Dusty Bin with a rucksack, and you can see it from four sides. The head hobbles up and down and spins independently from the body, and sometimes you can see a pair of eyes peeping out.

The guard droids are well up to standard. As for the ramps and causeways... well, I've seen better, but definitely nothing to complain about. Weapons are pretty imaginative too; frisbee-like disks, boomerangs, mortars and a bomb that bounces round corners.

I like Magnetron. It's similar in many ways to the aging Hewson classic Paradroid (written by Steve Turner's stablemate, Andrew Braybrook) but it contains enough original features to make it playable and absorbing in its own right.