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Favourite Game Genre Number Three: the beat-'em-up. People never tire of kicking the hell out of some poor pixel person, so if you like that kind of thing, Battlebound is bound to appeal to you. However, it isn't exactly a standard beat-'em-up because there's no actual physical fighting.

It's a basic horizontally-scrolling kill-monsters-and-collect-the-tokens game. You take on the role of some geezer called Calumn and your job is to work through three different levels: the Graveyard of the Beast, the Bridge of Fire and the Temple of Pain. Your ultimate aim is to defeat the head nasty, the Golem.

Along the way you encounter the inevitable adversaries who seem to have nothing better to do than try to kill you. You start off with only a simple axe to defend yourself. Collectable tokens provide extra weapons which you can then add to your initially meagre arsenal. Reach the end of a level and you must face the obligatory huge monster and kill it before you can go on. That's all there is to it.

The graphics aren't going to make you gasp. They look somewhat like the old 8-bit graphics where a black dithering effect was used for shading because of the lack of colours. The parallax scrolling works fine though, and there are some nice touches - droplets of blood flying off when something is hit, for example. Backgrounds are well drawn too. Graphically, it's no Wrath Of The Demon but it's adequate. Sound is functional.

Battlebound is an odd little game. It's nothing to look at, and watching someone else playing it wouldn't exactly make you want to rush out and buy a copy. But once you get seriously involved with the gameplay, it has a strange kind of addictiveness. You almost feel ashamed of enjoying such a simple and primitive-looking game. But it is enjoyable, and after all - despite the emphasis sometimes placed on the quality of graphics and sound - playability and gameplay are what really count.

In fact, you're probably going to spend longer trying to beat this than something like Wrath Of The Demon or Shadow Of The Beast, because unlike those games it's not impossibly difficult to get through. Battlebound is ideal for whiling away those spare half-hours when you've nothing better to do - just make sure you don't tell anyone.