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The wrinklies are here to stay - and they're getting wrinklier and more prolific. With advances in medical research, this trend is set to continue - and in Wolfchild, it's helped by Kal Morrow, a leading scientist who has questionably improved the world by increasing the average human life by 40 years. He lives with his family on a remote island. Or at least he did until he went and got himself kidnapped by the international terrorist organisation, CHIMERA who also murdered his wife and eldest son.

But Saul, his youngest son was, by a happy stroke of luck since this is you, out doing a spot of oceanographic research. When you get home and find your mother's corpse, you resolve to avenge the brutal killers. Fortunately, Kal was a dab hand at writing genetic programs to create lycanthropic warriors, so you take the obvious course in view of your own wimpishness and turn yourself into a werewolf.

All this wibble is a pathetic excuse for Wolfchild, a not-especially-cutesy platform game played over five levels in different locations like on a boat and in the jungle. You start off as a human, but once you've picked up enough bonuses and kicked in enough radiators, your vitality bar goes above the norm and you get to be a wolf - the advantage of this is that your strength is massively improved. Instead of just throwing a fairly pathetic punch, you get bullets coming out of your fingertips in various useful directions.

You do the usual stuff: exploring to collect bonuses for points, extra lives and vitality bar extensions, shooting things, punching fully armed vicious-looking exterminators - these die quite easily, actually - and leaping from platform to platform and over enormous walls. The game is totally joystick controlled and you have to be something of an expert waggler to get off the platform and over the walls without falling back to where you started from. Oh yes, and if you're a wolf, you can jump up and down on something which might break, so you can get at some other bonus underneath it.

Just an ordinary platform shoot-'em-up, really, but remember - it's all in a good cause. If you finish the game, you'll have avenged the death of your family and rescued your father from the kidnappers - and that's important.

The sound is nothing to get wound up about, the sprites are reasonably well-drawn and detailed although you might wish they were just that tiny bit bigger on occasions, then you could merely jump hard on your assailants and squash them instead of getting involved in unpleasant murderous stuff.

All in all, it's okay if you fancy a quick bit of mindless violence, but for long term interest, there must be better things you could spend your time doing - like researching how to de-lycanthropise yourself.

1. There's nothing special about this shoot-'em-up at all.
2. Nor is there anything especially bad about it apart from the plot.