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Ramparts is a curious variation on those medieval knights in armour combat games. Instead of taking it out on each other with axes and spiky shotputts, our stainless steel heroes let loose on stone walls.

That's right, they go about punching walls with their fists until they fall down - the walls, that is. Were this not the Dark Ages, these blokes would be certified as complete nutters, or given lucrative contracts with McAlpines. Apparently, the Evil One has turned our two knights into ferocious marauding giants and then scarpered. The two knights must hunt him down by demolishing all the castles they can until they find the one he's hiding in. By the way, you only get two knights if you're playing the two-player option.

This story sounds pretty crummy. To my mind there are lots of good points to becoming a ferocious marauding giant, not least of which is getting to the front of the cashpoint queue.

Anyway, you start by demolishing a castle with five turrets. Each turret must be dealt with individually by knocking out the required number of bricks on either side. You simply climb up the walls, punching bricks out as you go. When you've done enough brick punching, the turret falls down with an impressive crumbling sound, and you move to the next one.

Carry on like this until all the turrets are down. Then it's on to the next level where there's a surprisingly similar castle with six turrets - and so it goes on.

To make things difficult, there are various nasties both in the air and on the ground. The airborne variety look like vultures which drop white specks onto you, the kind of white specks you'd see splattered on a car windscreen. Being attacked by a vulture or hit by its fallout makes your damage meter display (at the top of the screen) go down.

Nasties on the ground also increase your damage. These include fire-breathing monsters that pace up and down, and gnomes that shoot catapults (that white stuff again) and fire cannons.

To repair damage, you must pick up various items hidden in the walls of the castle. You'll find them as you punch the bricks out. You must pick these up immediately (funnily enough, by punching them). If the turret goes down before you've got them, they're lost for good. And you'll really need them on higher levels, where the nastiness factor increases dramatically. Here you'll find those white specks coming at you from turret windows.

Your knight is graphically pretty big and moves well. He can punch both sideways and upwards, sideways to take out bricks and upwards to punch the birds. Unfortunately, there's not much you can do about the grounded nasties, simply climb a wall or try to jump over them.

To climb a wall, your knight must be positioned at exactly the right spot. Once on the wall, he sticks there like a fly and can be moved up and down with the joystick. He can also walk across the tops of the turrets.

That's it really, except to tell you how the two-player option works. Each knight is controlled by its own joystick, and works independently of the other, climbing and punching bricks in the same way. But it's best to work as a team, since it gets you through the levels quicker. Even if one knight dies, the other can still carry on.

One quirk is that if you can destroy a turret whilst your companion is still on it, it falls down leaving him suspended in mid air - slick programming.

Ramparts might be a reasonably original and enjoyable game if it didn't rely, right down to its logo, on Rampage for its inspiration. At least the characters are large and the graphics fairly bold. My biggest criticism is that there's not enough variety: the castles on each of the levels look pretty much the same, so do the nasties.

Bashing bricks and watching turrets fall down is good fun for a while, but there's little else to do. I reckon you could get bored with this game pretty quickly if you didn't use the two-player option. And even then, you can't bash your co-player.