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You and your trusty panther must plod through vertically scrolling streets punching out the lights of assorted baddies.

The chief of intelligence has been kidnapped. The CIA is counting on your natural survival skills and the hunting instincts of your black panther. You must rescue the chief from the clutches of the evil Mafia, with nothing but a Magnum and an oversized moggy to aid you.

The game consists of five levels of fighting against evil thugs who want to turn kitty into a rug and you into mincemeat. Right from the start the game hits you with a full screen title page and colourful game backgrounds. Such attractive graphics have become a trademark of Titus.

The between-level and scoreboard screens really enhance the game and are its main asset. The in-game sprites are colourful but move rather jerkily and tend to slow down when there are more than three on-screen at once. The panther has been drawn carefully and paces about menacingly, if rather mechanically.

The background graphics do become repetitive as the game progresses but remain colourful throughout. The game is played along a flick-screen landscape. I think it would have been better had it been a scrolling landscape as the flick can be slow and somewhat disorientating. The high score table is animated with a silently snarling puma, a novel feature if ever I saw one!

The sound in the game is adequate but doesn't come anywhere near the standard of the graphics. There are three tunes in total, all in a rather similar vein. The ingame tune is reasonable but tends to get repetitive after a while. There is only one tune for all of the five levels which is a shame as different tunes would have given the levels more individuality and help to break up the monotonous action. The spot effects are rather limited and tinny but serve their purpose.

It is in the playability stakes that the game loses out. It soon becomes repetitive with only one type of baddie to kill on each level. End-of-level guardians are just normal thug sprites which take several hits to kill. The omission of a decent end-of-level challenge is a great shame.

The panther adds a little originality to an otherwise antiquated game style. It is apparently here to help you, although only in dire circumstances can it be provoked into doing its party piece, a lethargic but nonetheless lethal leap. Most of the time all your feline friend does is pace about, slowing down the frame rate. I found the joystick controls so fiddly that I had to resort to keys: very annoying.

A multitude of moves are available to you but you will be hard pressed to use more than a couple during the game. Once you have mastered the controls, there is little incentive to play on through all the levels. The control mechanism for firing the gun is a trifle unusual. If you are near enough to your adversaries to use fists and feet you end up using brawn and not a Beretta to dispatch the enemy. The game has no pause feature which is very annoying as it can take some time to finish.

When you finally get to the end of the fifth level and meet up with the hostage you must then trudge all the way back to the start with the chief following obediently to heel. You will then be rewarded with the end screen and tune.

It's a shame to say it but this game looks and plays like the same old Titus formula, great graphics, good sound but gameplay that just fails to hold the interest after only a few plays. It's the graphics which grab your attention but the action just can't hold it.

One nice touch is the hall of fame scoreboard in the disc version, which is constantly updated and will give you a permanent record of the ease with which you completed the game.