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Reading the scenario for Skweek is likely to have you throwing up across the front of your monitor: "Skweek is a lovable bundle of orange. His mission is to clean up his planet, painting it pink instead of blue."

If that doesn't get you, one look at the garish dazzle of the colours on screen will. This is one of those games designed to appeal to 'all the family', in this case by smearing it with bucketloads of sickly cuteness. Underneath the marzipan, Skweek is as addictive as a guava jelly and almond butter sarnie.

It I was to describe this game in the usual way, you'd quickly get the impression that Skweek was coma-inducing: Pacman-style play, pick up icons for special powers, avoid the blob-like monsters and ghosts, fifty levels, etc, etc. Right, well on that score Skweek is certainly nothing original. If you're the sort of gamer who won't play Falcon because Spectrum Holobyte put in the wrong brand of radio-cassette player, you'll hate this. If, however, you can get past the sweet wrapper, you'll find Skweek no soft-centre. This is an almond crunch of a game.

The sprites are huge and boldly defined and the general impression throughout is of arcade quality graphics. There are a huge variety of obstacles to get around; disintegrating tiles, slopes, slippery surfaces, teleporters. Each level has a dozen twists and turns in it, all scrolling as smoothly as you could wish. Like Zoom (another CU fave) the idea is to rush around and colour in all the tiles, but in Skweek all you're obliged to do is to touch each one. You are, of course, pursued unrelentingly by a horde of unpleasant characters. These range from fast, but erratically moving ghosts, to unshootable, but freezable fire sprites.

The variety of icons you can pick up during the game is one of the best things about it and it's well worth keeping an eye on the indicator of the side screen which shows you when they appear. At the start, Skweek is only able to lob one pitiful ball. This changes up to a much more enjoyable four, then eight, with laser balls that blast their way through everything. The best of all these, though, is freeze power. Your enemies are immobilised and then, for a bonus, you can charge into them, shattering them into a thousand pieces.

All this would have meant nothing if the gameplay wasn't both balanced and challenging, which it is, even with a good deal of randomness involved with the appearances of icons. Certainly anyone can play Skweek, but it's not easy at all to get to the later screens. This has all the elements of an infuriating, but long-lasting game, but then again, the music reminds me of Camberwick Green, so maybe I'm just regressing back into childhood.