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Prepare to dress up in funny clothes, smear shoe polish on your face and undertake any suicidal mission. You are a member of the US Navy's SEALS (Sea, Air and Land commandos) - an elite, deadly, all-American hero. As luck would have it, your skills are needed to rescue a downed helicopter crew and destroy the terrorists' stockpile of stinger missiles.

Navy SEALS is a platform game, set across eight scrolling levels. Each one is played against the clock, so you have to moe quickly. Level one is a harbour, and you have all of four minutes to put detonators on nine crates of stinger missiles. Simply charging around shooting gung-ho style, however, soon kills off your team of five crack commandos. You need to sneak up on the guards to have any chance. They fire back only when they've seen you, so swift and sneaky is the order of the day.

Your commando is joystick-controlled, with a wide range of moves, including grabbing the platform above him and swinging up - very useful for surprising a guard above you. Falling too far or engaging in hand-to-hand combat injures your chap, and being shot is instant death. Extra weapons can be collected by shooting at the crates helpfully marked "weapon". The best if a deadly rocket-launcher.

Your progress through the levels depends on memorising the positions of the guards and stingers, and practising the available moves. Level one is easy, but the same soons hots up. Some platforms look impossible to reach and require some thought as well as dextrous wrist action. Once you've found all the stingers, you advance to the next level. You get two chances at the new level before having to start at the beginning again. This can be very frustrating, as you battle through the early levels time and time again. A simple password system would have been much better.

The graphics are detailed and the sprites are well animated overall, particularly the guards. Your all-American hero looks good, especially when swinging up or down from a platform. He does tend to levitate on platform edges though, and can lie down and die in mid-air. Nearly all the terrorists look the same - a greater variety would have added a lot. The sampled sound effects match the game well - thumps, cries and shooting noises. Thankfully there is no chip music.

The scenario certainly wins no prizes for promoting world peace, and all the terrorists are shown as racial stereotypes - but that apart, Navy SEALS is just a straightforward platform game like any other. Although well produced and packaged, it offers nothing new in terms of graphics or gameplay to lift it from the crowd. The absence of a password system to access later levels seriously limits the game's long term appeal, and only really hardened arcade players are likely to reach Beruit, where the final mission takes place. If you enjoy leaping from platforms and shooting things, you'll certainly enjoy this game, but it lacks that special ingredient to make it an outstanding game rather than just a reasonably good one.