Have you ever seen that bit in Fantasia with Mickey Mouse as the sorcerer's apprentice - I was always scared of brooms as a kid, so it freaked me. Well, Wilberforce is a five-level platform game starring a character called Wil, another sorcerer's scivvy and who's also been dabbling in the arcane arts in secret. Even more spookily he has also decided that a broom would be a decent subject to experiment on. The Lord of Flies obviously has some problem with this though, as he took the broom Wil and multiplied it (aargh - the nightmares are coming back)

Two brooms. Four brooms... eight... 12... 32... 64... [Yeah, we get the point - Ed] and onwards. That's a lot of brooms, and they're all off to steal the sorcerer's magic scrolls (so how exactly do brooms pick up anything?). If you don't want to get fired, you'd better follow the brooms to the caves to retrieve the scrolls.

The game Wil has to journey through is complex, comprising mainly caves with doors that lead off to other caves, each cave being a sub-level crammed with platforms. On each of the five main levels Wil has to collect four scrolls, scattered around the various sub-levels, in order to progress to the next section. You'll also find a few other things scattered around, such as a magic wand on level one which can be used to your advantage on level two. Gives the whole thing a nice holistic feel, don't you think?

But matters are complicated by these damned brooms which Wil needs to fend off. Luckily, for a practising magician, Wil has already got quite a few tricks up his long purple sleeves. His main forms of defence and attack are magic crystals, fireballs and lightning bolts, in that order - the bolts are far more damaging than the crystals, but you need to collect enough magic energy before you can fire these off

So there's a reasonably drawn bloke in a dress, running around the various levels retrieving things and blasting away at other things. The balance between the shooting and exploration aspects of the game are well-balanced, especially in the first three levels, each of which contains two different game styles; open caverns and individual platform screens.

Levels four and five are a little bit of a departure from the norm, as level four has no brooms to destroy, only scrolls to be collected. Level five is totally different as it features Wil running home across the hills with his spoils, chased by a horde of witches, who've found a use for all those broomsticks. On the one hand, it might be a bit of a cop-out to change the playing style for the final level, but it works quite well in Wilberforce, as the game still needs to follow some sort of plot.

It's not all good news, though - there are a few things that let Wilberforce down badly. The first one is the control system which, though it's a straightforward jump, duck, left and right affair, has a few flaws, making your blokey a little difficult to control at points that you could really do with some precision 'stick work.

This makes some of the cave unnecessarily irritating, because you spend most of your time fighting off the brooms with an increasingly inept Wil.

This game also suffers from a lack of polish. The graphics are decent enough, though nothing to write home about, the actual level design, controls and general presentation is a bit rough, almost as if it hasn't been finished yet. It's unfortunate, because this really could have been an excellent adventure. It's still a playable enough jaunt, and there are always going to be people who like games like this, but it's not the sort of game you show to your mates to impress them with what the C64 is capable of.

If you really want to blip around a series of caves destroying evil brooms and fighting a bad control system you can, but I'll just stay in bed, okay?

1. It's got potential for real depth.
2. There are some good ideas in here.

1. Sadly the potential could have been used better.
2. The controls leave a lot to be desired.
3. Shame that what good ideas there were, got lost somewhere.