But you'd be wrong, so wrong, to think that. This is Breathless, and it's the fourth (by my counting) serious attempt at doing Doom - But On The Amiga. And sadly for it, it's also a Doom - But On The Amiga too far. And at that you might be saying "But for why, Stuart? It looks smashing", and here are the things I would say in response:

Picture the scene: you are the fourth attempt at doing Doom - But On The Amiga. You have previously seen Gloom be fantastic and bloody, if perhaps a little heavy on the slaughter and a little light on the strategy (which is, in fact, perfectly fine, but that's another story). You have previously seen Fears look very lovely indeed, but commit a series of idiotic gameplay sins and end up being a bit hateful. And you have previously seen Alien Breed 3D be Alien Breed - but in 3D. You're trying to think of an 'angle' with which to distinguish yourself from the competition, which you've had the luxury of checking out in great depth. You think, perhaps, of this:

"Well, for a start, all previous Doom - But On The Amiga games have been set in pretty much the same kind of scenario, and the corridors-and-rooms- on-some-sort-of-moonbase-and-outside-bits-with-lava-pits-in-them formula is getting a bit threadbare. Perhaps I could set myself in some new and exciting kind of place - maybe a spooky mystery mansion (which would, let's face it, have a lot more reason for being stuffed with secret passageways and hidden rooms, for a start), or maybe a Victorian sewer system populated by the ghosts of drowned construction workers, or even some kind of gigantic science-laboratory maze from which the player, as a much-experimented-on and pissed-off lab rat, is attempting to escape. For example. Or, on the other hand, I could just rip off everybody else and be yet another space-station potboiler with mutated human soldiers and aliens that look a bit like the ones in Aliens as enemies. Yes, that'll do."

That done, you begin to ponder the magical mysteries of gameplay.

"Now, the really great thing about Doom, the thing that really made everyone fall for it, was that it had a believable atmosphere. That doesn't just mean that it looked realistic, but also that the enemies you found there behaved in a plausible manner - they were found in the sort of places you'd expect them to be found, they would wander around quite happily going about their own business until they noticed you (so you could sometimes sneak up and shoot them in the back), and then they attacked you in a vicious but convincing way, ie they sometimes missed. Where something like Fears fell down was that the enemies were nearly always found just hanging around doors waiting for you to open them, or invariably all spotted you simultaneously the instant you walked into an area, as if they'd all been simply staring all day at the spot where you would arrive, and immediately slaughtered you in a withering crossfire of infallible pinpoint accuracy. I'd better be careful that, for example, my enemies don't behave in exactly the same way as that."

But wait a minute. That could call for some careful, painstaking design.

"Actually, no, on the other hand I can't be bothered. I'll just stick 'em all behind the doors, it'll be harder that way. And to make it even harder, I'll make them attack by charging right up against the player regardless of how many times he shoots them, then shuffling around his body so that he has to slowly turn round, taking hits all the time, before he can get them in his sights. And I'll make sure there's nearly always three or four of them at a time, too, and with no autorepeat on his guns, so he has to hammer at the keyboard like a demented drummer with only one drumstick. And he won't be needing any of those fancy joystick or mouse control options, either."

Right. You've got the difficulty sorted out. But there's more than one string to this particular bow - one of the best things about Gloom was its superb pacing. How best to ensure that the game keeps rollicking along at a cracking rate, for that constant, exhausting, adrenalin-pumping excitement?

"Hmm. Tricky. It would be terribly easy to fall into the old trap of extending the game's life by forcing the player to constantly trek backwards and forwards over previously-explored and cleared terrain by, for example, putting switches at the opposite end of a level to the doors they open. Yes, that would be terribly easy."

But you can't, of course, just reduce the game to lots of aimless traipsing around occasionally interrupted by frantic bouts of keyboard-shattering gunfights. You'll need other stuff for the player to do - treasure and weaponry to collect, secret stuff to find, all that malarkey.

"How hard can that be? The only way I could possibly mess it up would be to have, for example, weapons collected by buying them from a computer terminal, like some kind of absurd flamethrower vending machine, which is clearly a stupid idea compared to finding them lying around in the aftermath of a terrible alien invasion, or stealing them from enemies you've just killed. Or by showing the location of secret passages on the automatic map facility, somewhat defeating the object of their being 'secret' in the first place. Although that would compensate somewhat in the eventuality that, for some reason, you could only open doors and secret passages by standing infuriatingly squarely in front of them, which would otherwise make looking for secret entrances an extremely tedious and time-consuming operation. I suppose."

Oh yeah. You have remembered the map facility, haven't you?

"Of course. What do you take me for, the kind of idiot who would have a map facility that you couldn't move around in? For example."

Well, I think that's pretty much everything covered. With a bit of luck, there's just time to have a quick check for some of those obvious annoying flaws that sometimes sneak through at the end if you're not paying attention. So: stupid, almost illegible copy protection that's actually easier to use after you've photocopied it?

"Check."

Lava pits that you can fall into but that there isn't any way out of except dying?

"Check."

Long corridors lined on either side with lots of little vestibules that - shock! - enemies are hiding in?

"Check."

Bits where you have to jump down a wall that you can't get back up, but with no sign of whether or not going down might be a good idea?

"Check."

Fantastically irritating teleporters that transport you right back to the start of a level without any kind of warning, when you've just spent 20 minutes fighting your way through to them in the first place?

"Check."

Having no status screen at the end of a stage to let you know whether you've found all the secret rooms, killed all the enemies and so on?

"Check."

Only giving the player three lives, after which he must agonisingly re-do anything up to five previously-completed stages, since the game is constructed as four levels of five stages each, with passwords only available for each full level?

"Check."

Hang on. When you say "Check", you don't mean that you actually *have* included all these things, do you?

"Yes. Isn't that what you meant?"

BUT STUART, THAT'S NOT FAIR

An exciting new regular, and self-explanatory, column.

"But Stuart, you can't slag it off just for having the same scenario as all the other Doom games in the world. They've done it like that on purpose, so it will be Just Like Doom."

Hitler started World War 2 on purpose, that didn't make it a good idea. You wouldn't, I trust, expect us to give him 95% for having so successfully achieved the aim of Starting A World War, when it was clearly a bit of a duff aim in the first place. So SHUT UP.

"But Stuart, I just want to play Doom - But On The Amiga, and I simply want to know which of the alternatives available to me is the best one, not listen to you bang on about principles of gameplay and stuff."

If that's all you want to know, then here's the answer: Breathless is the closest thing on the Amiga so far to the original Doom. If that's more important to you than whether it's actually a good game or not, then go and buy it, otherwise get Gloom. There, I've told you. So SHUT UP.

"But Stuart, I actually *like* trudging back and forth up and down dark grey corridors for hours and hours, occasionally blasting a few aliens who were hiding behind a door waiting for me. In real life, too.

UPPERS

It looks great, it's fast, it's hard, it's the closest thing yet to the original Doom. But on the Amiga.

DOWNERS

But it's designed in the laziest, most witless way imaginable, stuffed full of many of the flaws that made Fears so unpleasant. And there's no Deathmatch option.

THE BOTTOM LINE

Technically lovely, there's no denying it, and a pretty fair attempt at a direct clone (albeit one done by people who've more or less completely failed to grasp the whole point of the original). But you won't care, because by halfway through level two you'll be sound asleep.