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Forget Poirot, Dixon of Dock Green and Robocop - the future of law enforcement is Rolling Ronny - a roller-skating clown-turned-errand-boy with a nose redder than Rudolph's. But can Our Man Ron deliver the goods or will his efforts to produce a good platform puzzler prove to be a mission impossible?

Ronny is an errand boy. Not just any old errand boy, mind you, but a roller-skating errand boy who used to be a circus clown and now doubles as an undercover agent for Scotland Yard. I'm beginning to get a headache already...

The town of Fieldington has been rocked by an audacious jewel robbery. Luckily, the thieves were nabbed before they could escape, but the jewels weren't recovered, having been fiendishly hidden all over the town in small, gaudily-coloured boxes. (Nurse! The aspirins!) In order to avoid an outcry at their security lapse, Scotland Yard hire the (ahem) inconspicuous Ronny to skate around town and retrieve the boxes before news of the theft leaks out and outrages the general public.

In a surreal twist, a recent explosion at the headquarters of the Fieldington Magic Circle has caused some of the local wildlife to become mutated and many of the local drivers to go just a little bit off the rails.

As if all this wasn't enough, stingy old Scotland Yard haven't furnished our hero with an expense account, so in addition to all the jewel-collecting malarkey Ronny has to perform all his usual errand-running duties in order to earn enough money to pay for the bus rides between the various areas of the town where the boxes are hidden.

It's not all bad, though; he can also find useful items like smelly cheese, powerful bicycle horns or ultra-dangerous sneeze bombs lying about which can save him from some of the bad guys' worst attacks, or he can buy them in shops using coins he's obtained by throwing various items of fruit at flying books and falling stars.

Well, that's enough plot for one lifetime. What it all boils down to in the end is a horizontally-scrolling platform-leaping escapade which has quite a bit in common with Bart Simpson. Ronny skates through nine lengthy levels avoiding baddies, collecting the tiny jewel boxes, and running backwards and forwards delivering messages to make money for his bus fare. Fieldington is displayed in bright, colourful cartoony graphics accompanied by bouncy music, and the screen scrolls quickly and smoothly.

At first it's all very enjoyable, although not very demanding - apart from the odd car or hard-to-spot hole in the ground, there really isn't a lot getting in Ronny's way - with the simple controls and fast-moving play making everything flow along at a fair old rate.

There's a nagging feeling at the back of your mind all the time though, and it's a feeling that there's something missing. Everything you need for a good game seems to be present and correct, but it doesn't quite all gel together properly, that magic gameplay element just isn't there. By the time you get to the second level though, the shallow-but-fun platform action has been replaced to a large extent by a puzzle-based idea, which, at its most basic, amounts to a simple matter of working out which of the various power-up devices is needed at which point.

At a blow, this takes most of the pace and enjoyment straight out of the game, leaving a tedious amount of traipsing back and forth over the same old ground discovering by trial and error what the correct course of action to get through each section is in its place. By the time you're halfway through the third level you'll more than likely be wishing you'd never started the whole sorry affair.

And another thing, why is it that all us tape users are always treated like something the programmer stepped in in the street? Rolling Ronny comes in three bits at first - the title sequence, the front end, then the first level. If killed in that first level, you have to rewind the tape all the way back to the beginning of the second section and hang around for another two or three minutes while it loads in the first level all over again before you can continue play. This is so unfriendly that I suggest that tape users take 20% off the mark at the bottom of this review, because they'll spend far more time hanging around waiting than they do playing the actual game.

Rolling Ronny is a promising idea which rapidly becomes incredibly boring. I wasted an entire Saturday playing this game when I could have been happily sitting at home watching old black-and-white movies on BBC2 - don't make the same mistake as I did.

1. Very repetitive indeed.
2. Lacking in thrills.
3. Hellish tape multiload.
4. Initially too easy to really get you hooked.
5. More of a puzzler than a platformer...
6. But without the real cerebral pull.
7. Depends entirely on the right choice of power-ups.
8. A waste of a nice idea.

1. Pretty enough graphics.
2. Reasonable sound effects.
3. An 'interesting' plot.
4. Funny manual.
5. Levels increase in difficulty, but it's all too late to stop boredom setting in.