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It's a bit odd to find myself reviewing this just now, because there's a demo on this month's cover-mounted disk allowing you to see it and decide just how good it is (or isn't!) on your own. Still, it's my opinion you want here so it's my opinion you shall have, and, actually I think it's rather good.

Not as good as the excellent (and similarly themed) Toki or Chuck Rock admittedly, but a fun and likeable platform romp nonetheless.

So what's it all about? Well, you play Prehistorik, a very hungry caveman. This isn't any sort of elaborate rescue mission you're on, as it is in the games just mentioned, but simply a quest for food - if you've ever wondered how the dinosaurs died out, it's not because of the ice age or a meteorite fall or anything fancy like that, but simply because Prehistorik ate them all!

You see, he's only allowed off a level if he managed to club unconscious and then walk over (and so nosh) 99.9 per cent of all dinos/grizzly bears/unnameable prehistoric thingies he comes across. I think the game's a bit too strict with this - it would be better if you were allowed to ignore more of the creatures if you wanted, and still get off the level - but it's not too big a fault.

As it stands though, it can get annoying (and repetitive), especially when you find you've got to trek all the way back to somewhere neat the start of the level (if the landscape lets you, that is) to trough a few last monsters to fill you up.

Levels are your standard platform and ladders sort of thing - in fact, the whole thing has something of the feel of a Super Mario game, though without the depth or finely tuned gameplay. The creatures are undeniably cute (the little bears still wag their tales when unconscious, for instance) and the standard world designs (an ice world with penguins and so on, a jungle one with monkeys and the like) are well done. Unusually, between the proper levels comes a sort of boxing match affair (quite what the explanation for this is, I don't know) where Prehistorik has to take on some giant dino, caveman or whatever while battling a never-ending procession of smaller versions off the screen. Reasonably cute and fun, but slight and likely to become a bit of a pain after a while, you could say.

Other faults? Well, the game only scrolls on a screen when you get right to the edge of it, which seems unnecessary (apparently a hang-over of the original version being done in ST STOS) and the wait while it reloads the levels and so on can be a bit of a pain.

You could also argue that the whole thing gets a bit samey after a while too - more hectic platform-leaping action and less of this rather repetitive bonking-dinosaurs-on-the-head-and-then-tucking-in stuff would have been nice - but basically it's a pretty, appealing and actually rather loveable little romp which only suffers a bit because its two most obvious rivals are so good, not because of any real faults in the game itself.

A likeable caveman platformer with plenty of 'quite nice' bits to it. But little that really stuns. Good, but buy Toki and (of course) Chuck Rock first.