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It's a funny old world. One minute you're driving rivets into bolt-holes and turning flange wheels to match the drill bits, and the next you're stuck in the middle of a Roman temple, looking for treasure.

Good old P.P. Hammer, everyone's favourite construction worker/adventurer, has undertaken a quest to find all the treasure contained within 70 levels filled with pits, platforms and pesky little creatures. Not until all the treasure in one location has been found, will the door leading to the next open, and even then the overworked navvy still has to search to find it.

Although the title conjures up images of either violence and gore on a massive scale or innuendoes that even Frankie Howerd would shy away from, P. P. Hammer And His Pneumatic Weapon is no more offensive than a Cliff Richard concert in Westminster Cathedral. What is is, is a highly enjoyable and challenging platform game that owes more than its fair share to numerous 'classics', including Rick Dangerous and Impossamole.

One problem that Demonware seems to have with P.P. is deciding what it wants its main character to be: while on the packaging and intro screens he's a "cutesy" bespectacled young lad, once you're into the game he turns into a real construction worker-type, puffing on a fag if you leave him for a while and throwing insults if you fail the bonus round.

The other problem that's stopping P.P. reaching the hallowed heights that only Rick has managed to scale before, is that it gets a little too confusing. The inclusion of invisible platforms and having treasure hidden behind blocks serves, on the later levels, to frustrate rather than challenge and the whole thing tends to border on the 'been there, done that' syndrome.

There is a lot to do and there are plenty of nice touches (the helpful scrolls, the bonus rounds and the little 'Roger Milla' samba that P.P. does when he completes a level, to name but three) and the actual idea of having to dig your own route, as it were, is a novel one.

It's a shame that there's isn't any real way to attack your opponents (let's face it, a pneumatic hammer makes for a great weapon) and a few more settings would have been nice, but as it stands P. P. Hammer And His Pneumatic Weapon is a nice journey back into the platform game.