Well, firstly there's your fantastically stupid plot about a world where machines are considered evil with a one-way time portal to the modern world which leads straight to a present-day Las Vegas casino. Which is full, not of one-armed bandits, roulette wheels and people playing poker as you might expect, but of loads of ridiculous bad guys chucking fireballs and stuff at you every time you try to go up a set of stairs. Now I have to admit to a bit of a lack of research here - I've never actually been to Las Vegas, but if I ever do, I'll bet you anything you like that absolutely nobody throws any fireballs at me. But then, who ever expected game plots to be even vaguely sensible? Since I'm in a generous mood, we'll just forget about the plot, okay?

What's harder to forget is the incredibly annoying way this game plays. It's an overhead-view scroller with superficial Gauntlet similarities, but when you wander up to a bad guy and give him a swipe with your magical sword (which is a product of sorcery, not a machine, yeah?), he doesn't vanish in a puff of smoke, oh no. What he does is take a bit of damage and recoil away from you, simultaneously leaping about three feet to one side so that to hit him a second time, you have to traipse around and line yourself up with him all over again. This is so annoying I can hardly find the words to describe it - when I whack a baddie, I expect him to die. And that's that.

It wouldn't be quite so bad if the collision detection wasn't so picky, (which is annoying in itself when so much of the time you have to hit things diagonally - never the easiest of things to do reliably with a Mega Drive joypad at the best of times), but it is, and it makes a simple task like chopping up a couple of level-one sword-fodder goons something more like battling the final boss on Rolo To The Rescue.

And then there's the fact that there's some almost-good stuff in here that's been wasted by the laziest game engine imaginable. The way you choose between your wide range of weapons is quick and clever, and the graphical settings are some of the nicest I've seen in a while - scrapyards full of crushed cars, the insides of what looks like a Viking feasting hall viewed from above the ceiling rafters, or the Las Vegas setting itself which has exactly the kind of lush carpeting and neo- classical architecture you'd expect to find in such an establishment. Oh yeah, and there's a lovely fade-to-sepia effect which serves only to make the actual in-game colour scheme look garish and tacky. When's someone going to do something clever with graphics as an atmospheric tool, that's what I want to know.

So anyway. Technoclash - it's not the worst game I've ever seen, but with another month's work at the design stage, it could have turned into something really nifty, and to see that potential thrown away by laziness, well... It annoys me, y'know?

50 PERCENT