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Piranha have done a good job of not letting on that this game is a Gauntlet rip-off. They've given it one of those twee gut-wrenching titles and they've somehow omitted to feature any giveaway screenshots on the cassette inlay.

Add to that the drawing of women with Page Three cleavages on the inlay card, and you've got a pretty good cover-up job. But not good enough for CU's Clonewatch UK department - now over to Sue Cook and Inspector Knacker.

Piranha are trying, and failing dismally, to spoof the honoured Gauntlet tradition. Instead of mythical heroes we get Mr Weems, a failed bespectacled accountant who's launched into a new career as a vampire hunter. Instead of Gauntlet's zapper spells, wimpy Mr Weems is armed with a gun that shoots bits of garlic at the blood-sucking nasties. None of this is very funny - I've never yet chuckled over a piece of garlic.

On a more technical note, Mr Weems has no companion to help him though the various mazes. This element of teamwork is essential, as we all know, to any Gauntlet-type game.

For what it's worth, the game features six levels of a Mansion through which Mr Weems must progress, shooting bloodsucking nasties, Frankenstein-like monsters and She Vampires. The aim is to make it to the sixth level, where you find the Great She Vampire in her penthouse suite. Kill the GSV and escape from the Mansion and you'll have done a good day's work.

Apart from picking up keys (to open doors) blood bottles (to replenish your blood supply) and garlic bombs (they zap all the aliens in the immediate vicinity), there's one object that must be found and picked up per level. Without all five-stake, mallet, piece of mega-garlic, mirror and crucifix - you won't be able to kill the GSV.

The screen gives a constant display of your blood-count and how many keys and garlic bombs you're carrying. Your blood level decreases rapidly as you come into contact with bloodsucking bats, so blood bottles must constantly be picked up. Once you're out of blood it's back to the title screen.

Garlic bombs clear the screen (not the whole level) of nasties and only then can you shoot and disable the coffins that generate them. As soon as you move off that particular screen the bomb loses its effect so it's best to use them judiciously.

There's also a garlic pill you can use to give yourself a short period of immunity. Nastiest of the nasties are the She Vampires who, if they bump into you, divest you of what you were carrying at the time. It takes a lot of shots to despatch them. The shots, by the way, look like Hula Hoops. I've never laughed at Hula Hoops either.

Although graphics are reasonable and up to the standards you'd expect, there's nothing special or different about them. You get the usual overhead view, and the usual manic swarms of nasties that appear out of what look like medieval cooking pots.

In mitigation, levels are large and complex, scrolling both up and down, and sideways. Scrolling, though, is not smooth. It jerks from screen to screen. And annoyingly, when you return to a previous screen, you find all the cooking pots and nasties have reappeared. Action is as fast and furious as you'd expect but without the teamwork element to add interest, it all becomes very futile. That sums up the game really.