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Warlock is the third game in a series which has until now only appeared on 8-bit machines. The first, Druid, was one of a long line of Gauntlet clones which came out around the time of the official Gauntlet licence, and was generally the best received. Although the Amiga wasn't big news at the time, Druid has since been converted, and is included in Warlock as an optional introductory level.

Warlock itself is largely more of the same, featuring eight increasingly tough mazes populated by all the usual social misfits with attitude problems. And, er, that's about it.

The first thing you notice about Warlock is how very similar it is to the original game. The graphics follow exactly the same style, and the gameplay is identical, consisting simply of trudging rather slowly around the scrolling mazes, zapping baddies, collecting useful items, and looking for the way out. In fact, Warlock appears to be less of a sequel to the earlier game than an expansion set, adding tougher levels and different baddies but nothing that you could actually describe as 'new'. As such, it's a success, proving tricky and pretty engrossing, but is liable to be a bit of a disappointment if you're expected a genuinely new game.

Someone's made a bit of a cock-up on the presentation front too, as starting a new game entails waiting some 35 seconds for a long picture to painstakingly scroll across the screen and then for the game to think about loading again! Not too terrible in itself, but with only one life (which won't last you very long at all in your first few games) you'll see a lot of this picture, and grow to hate it as I did.

What Warlock does, it does pretty well. If you want a slightly slower paced version of Gauntlet then fine, here it is, and it'll provide plenty of short-term fun. At the end of the day though it amounts to nothing more than a marginal re-spray of a five year-old game, and as such it's very hard to justify the £25 price tag.

Easy to play but difficult to get very far into, with re-loading sequences that are actually longer than the game which precedes them. A blast from the past that doesn't really cut it in today's market.