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Following on from the chart-busting original, Robocop 2 places you once more in the tin wellies of Alex 'metal' Murphy. This time he's on the trail of a vicious Detroit drug ring which is pushing 'Nuke' to the kids of the city.

The game initially follows Murphy's efforts to track down the villains through different sections of their Nuke plant on the Rouge River, while destroying Nuke canisters and rescuing hostages, Robocop has to stomp across horizontally scrolling scenes, making his way across platforms and avoiding booby traps and hazardous machinery. Huge metal crushers plummet from the roof and threaten to flatten the stainless one, rolling oil drums have to be jumped over, death-bringing electric sparks leap between electrodes, rotating cogs trip up the unwary and conveyor belts carry our hero towards certain doom.

Robocop's jumping abilities have to be employed to avoid most of these hazards while his gun takes care of the more humanoid-shaped problems. As befits a three-ton copper; Robo is slightly tricky to control with poor acceleration and some horrible inertia - it really feels like this guy has a weight problem!

There are collectibles to... collect, and these include weapon power-ups (autofire, three-way fire, scatterfire and heat-seekers), temporary invincibility, extra time and cans of baby food to replace Robo's lost energy. Everything you'd expect from a first class platform game is there. The trail continues in this vein through another factory complex, until Robocop meets the drug lord Cain in a single screen shoot-out to the death.

After a head-to-head battle with Cain, Robocop must then advance to the Civic centre where Robocop 2 (controlled by the recently demised Cain) is being unveiled to the populace. Then it's on to the final showdown with the maniacal machine.

Ocean's efforts are cartoon-like: visuals are bold, very brightly coloured (bordering on gaudy) and the characters all have a very cartoony feel.

The game's console heritage (it was originally designed for the Nintendo System) shows through in the presentation and gameplay. There are loads of secret levels which you'll just have to find by trial and error, and the gameplay is tricky, entertaining and very addictive.

With twelve different levels, sub-games and shoot-outs (check out our panel pieces on these). Robocop 2 looks all set to carry on the phenomenal success of the original!

If you're having difficulty loading the Robocop 2 demo from the CF4 PowerPack, check out Inside Info. The tape demo has a sensitive loader and Inside Info tells you how to get sensitive loaders working when it seems they rather wouldn't.

1. Different arcade and puzzle sub-games break up the action and keep boredom at bay.
2. Hidden levels provide extra reasons to go exploring!
3. Inertia-heavy control really adds to the feeling of playing the part of Robocop
4. Twelve challenging levels to get to grips with.
5. Backdrops are heavily detailed and feature lots of nicely animated hazards.
6. Addictive mixture of tricky platform action and head-to-head shooting scenes.
7. Thumping series of soundtracks beef up the action.

1. Gaudy graphics lack atmosphere.