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Andromeda Software has worked awfully hard on Firebird's latest budget epic. The trouble is, the programmers left out one vital ingredient. Fun.

Pneumatic Hammers is an arcade/simulation game, set in the Lee Valley Gold Research Base at the bottom of a deep ravine. To either side of the base, enormous piston-like hammers are pounding bridge pillars into the river bed, but this incessant bonking is shaking up the rock face, causing continual landslides. The hammers must be switched off, but - oh no! - the power level has broken off!

Enter ace troubleshooter Red O'Blair. In a second he sizes up the situation, and declares that a new lever must be cast. This involves combing the landslides for gold nuggets, weighing them for purity, popping them into the furnace, stoking it up to the correct heat, and casting the new handle. Then the power can be switched off. Lesser mortals than Red would simply have pulled the fuse, but then we wouldn't have a game.

A cross-section of the playing area - the six floors of the Research Base, the six whamming hammers, the bridge pillars and river bed, and the rubble-strewn valley sides - is displayed in the bottom half of the screen. Keep an eye on this, because it not only shows Red's current position, but also the number of nuggets on each side of the river, and the expected site of the next rockfall.

The upper screen is where the action takes place, and this either displays our chunky hero as he leaps about the base and the river, bed, or else a close-up of his hand as it gropes for nuggets, metal detectors, crane controls, scales or the on/off switch.

Getting to the buried nuggets involves first taking a metal detector from the store, and then reaching the valley side by hopping from pillar to pillar, avoiding the descending hammers.

Then it's a quick scrabble about in the rubble with the detector, listening for the rising whine as it nears a nugget, dropping the gold. If you hear the rumble of an approaching landslide on your side of the valley, hang on to your detector or it'll get lost and you'll have to return to base for another.

While all this is going on, the hammers keep banging away, slowly knocking the pillars under the water. Stacks of logs on the river bank can be used to raise the pillars again, and if these run out, you can replenish them by nipping inside the base, operating the crane and lowering another load of timber.

All this frantic activity makes the game sound fast and furious, It's not. The pixel-perfect precision required to jump from pillar to pillar is not so much fun as frustrating, and the nugget-finding and crane-operating sequences quickly becomes tedious, having to return impossible brain teasers which used to appear in maths exams. And this is meant to be a game!

Pneumatic Hammers has lots of attractive features, like practice modes, the ability to set the frequency of rockslides and hammer falls, a detailed high score table, and even a 'play blind' option. Add to that, some adequate and effective SFT, complex and thoughtful gameplay, and reasonable graphics.

But, in the final analysis, Pneumatic Hammers leaves me flat (ouch!).