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Time, apparently, flies by when you're the driver of a train, but I'm not too sure why. I mean you just sit there, occasionally slowing the thing down or speeding it up and hoping some signalman has set the points right. Not my idea of fun. But that signalman I mentioned - now, he's got a much more tricky and interesting job, and luckily it's him you're taking the place of in Locomotion, and not old Jones the Steam.

The game's a darned fine little puzzle game based on the age old plot of getting your different coloured things to their own particular homes, avoiding obstacles along the way, only this time it's trains that you have to get to a particular station.

On each level the screen starts off void of any trains but with a rail system that looks a bit like a section of the London Underground map. Then a station will flash and, shortly afterwards, a train will leave that station carrying a particular letter. You have to guide this train to the station labelled with that letter. Sometimes it might even have to go back to the station it just left.

Usually, while this train is en route to its destination, another station will start to flash (maybe even the same station) and soon enough there'll be two trains on screen. This'll carry on until you have the maximum number of trains chuffing around for the level you've reached.

Trying to get the trains home in the right order can prove more than a little chaotic. You can end up with the most disastrous situations occurring - trains spinning across the screen, passengers plummeting to their doom into fast-flowing rivers, that sort of thing. The aim of the game is, however, not to ponder on the eventual fate, or the mental stability, of the people rich enough to travel by British Rail, but to get the trains home. You do this by controlling the points on the track.

The points are where one track converges with another. If a train is travelling in the right direction, it can either take the right or left fork depending on how you've set the points.

Each level has a different track layout, but the program also has a built-in level editor so that you can design your own tracks. Test your mates - make the tracks as tough or as easy as you like using the parameters editor which controls things like the speed of the trains and how many there can be on-screen at any one time.

Locomotion is not a logic puzzle, it's too frantic for that. It's more a test of your organisational skills. If you get in a flap everything will end up looking like the mess that your baby brother leaves in his pants when he's just been force fed a tin of mushy peas. What you need is an eye for detail and darned quick reactions.

Graphically, the tracks are pretty impressive and the surrounding buildings, plants and other trackside ephemera provide a decent setting. But the trains themselves look more like the remains when you've squashed a beetle, and not the sort that sung about love being all you need; as Ringo Starr looks completely different when he's squashed - more like a Sinclair C5.

1. Frantic puzzling.
2. Level editor to test your mates.
3. An anorak's heaven.

1. Graphics are nothing to write home about.
2. Not enough variety in the gameplay.
3. Who wants to admit to owning an anorak?