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This is a new budget release from CodeMasters. You play the stuntman, your task to complete five different scenes for an all-action movie and remain alive by the end of it. The scenes are shot in seven different locations, starting off with a car chase in a boulder-strewn desert

The action switches from there to a high speed power boat race, then to a forest scene, jumping the Grand Canyon, battling it out with street gangs in New York, shooting the rapids in a white water chase and a mystery grand finale, if you get that far.

As if this little set of tasks was not taxing enough, lots of baddies are intent on sending you to that Great Film Studio in the sky.

There are also perils such as land mines and dried out river beds to jump, and all this has to be completed within a given time.

The colourful action is viewed from above while the screen scrolls vertically. Controls are used from the keyboard or joystick; you have the ability to accelerate, decelerate, steer left or right and fire your cannon.

The screen is divided into a fair-sized playing area with the right hand side containing the score, time remaining and a damage report. This is represented by an overhead view of a car.

As damage occurs due to minor events such as slamming into another car or scraping along the sides of stone canyons, parts of the car disappear.

The prompts for the next scene come up, for example as Take 2 Scene 2. Given the number of people that worked on this program, how did they all manage to miss such an obvious spelling mistake?

In a way that sums up my feelings about this game. It's 85 per cent there, but the missing 15 per cent spoils the rest of the game for me.

It's a shame because Stuntman has the potential to be good, but it just misses out. A reasonable budget game though - fairly interesting at first, but I'm not sure that it has a lasting appeal.