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"Comedy," wrote the great philosopher Lord Timothy Silly, "should not be forced," which doesn't explain the continuing success of Jeremy Lloyd and David Croft, so we can discard him utterly.

Prehistorik is a comedy animated romp (Oh dear) featuring Prehistorik the caveman (Oh dear), a member of the T-Bone tribe (Oh dear) who likes to hit things with his big stick Diner-Club (Oh dear). Translated into real terms, or in other words without treating you like a viewer of 'Allo, 'Allo, it's a platform game in which you hit people. Reach the end of a level and you get to fight a positively enormous creature, so that's something to look forward to, eh?

Somewhere inside Prehistorik, there's a fairly good game trying to get out. There are certainly plenty of things to do - bonuses and secret rooms litter the environment in bounteous fashion - but the fun is smothered by awkward controls and shoddy programming. Achieving diagonal movement with a joystick is hard enough at the best of times, but Prehistorik requires you to do so if you want your blessed beard-thing to jump over an obstacle.

The instructions talk about pushing harder to make a longer jump, but because the horizontal movement is read before the diagonal, you can't run along then smoothly leap, but have to stop in the meantime. Prehistorik is fond of putting bottomless pits in your way, and for some insane reason doesn't support keyboard control. Well, that's that game knackered then, as they say.

Hideous dedication and a top-flight joystick does pay off, but then you have to contend with the less-than-smooth graphics and decidedly repetitive gameplay. All those hidden rooms and extras do brighten things up, but it's mostly a case of plodding around, hitting things and moving on to the next screen. It's not much fun, and you can make your own smug comments about cave people and dinosaurs existing in the same time period in the space provided.

Cartoony graphics, long levels and plenty of secret bonuses to squirrel out.

Slack movement, awful controls, no originality, a platform game whose only originality is a large number of platforms.