Primal Rage was, apparently, the biggest-selling coin-op of 1994. Not that that means an awful lot in the arcade world - it's the biggest-grossing coin-op that really tells the story - but it's something, at least. It also boasts what's allegedly the first ever use of 'full stop-motion animation' in a video game, and images digitised from seven 'amazingly life-like latex puppets'. Which is curious - how, exactly, did they find out what a real-life moving dinosaur looked like? Enquiring minds want to know. Oh, but I'm quibbling. Just for a laugh, let's get right down to it and start talking gameplay.

Time Warner's last attempt at a beat-'em-up, of course, was Rise Of The Robots. Rise Of The Robots, you'll recall, was famed for being the first beat-'em-up you could complete without once looking at the screen - just hold down up, right and fire and you'd defeat every single opponent. In a pleasing nod to tradition, the easier difficulty settings of Primal Rage reflect this exciting feature, in that if you hold down right and press the punch button repeatedly, you'll also beat every computer-controlled enemy (unless they jump over your head, in which case you have to switch to holding down left and hitting punch repeatedly - you see, tradition and progress).

Things get much trickier in Primal Rage, though, if you move up to, say, difficulty setting 10 (of 20). Then, you have to embark on the much trickier strategy of doing-a-permanent-crouching-block-and-swiping-at-the-ankles-of-anything- which-comes-near-you if you want to see the end sequence without all that tedious leaping around doing special moves and stuff. Jesus. What do they feed playtesters these days, Valium? Doesn't it ever occur to anyone to see if maybe, just maybe, doing one move over and over again in a beat-'em-up lets you win all the time? Hello?

Of course, software publishers (such as Time Warner, whose last attempt at a beat-'em-up was, of course, Rise Of The Robots) get very irate whenever reviews make complaints of this nature. "But it's a beat-'em-up", they whine, "You're only supposed to play it against another person, not the computer". Which is a valid, if crap, point. (Isn't the idea of video games, or at least one of the ideas, that they give you someone to play with if you haven't got any friends round? Or just haven't got any friends, period?) But the same criticism still holds true - if blocking and swiping always works against the computer, it'll always work against another player as well. The solution, of course, is for both players to agree in a gentlemanly manner not to use the blocking and swiping strategy, but there are two flaws in this option, namely; (1) It's very hard for a player who's getting his face smashed in to resist a quick bit of sneaky block-and- swipe-ing regardless, and (2) If everyone's being so damn gentlemanly about everything, what are they doing trying to beat each other up in the first place? Tchah.

So the gameplay's a bit crap. But maybe all isn't lost - beat-'em-ups, in particular (like Rise Of The Robots, which was of course Time Warner's last attempt at the genre), are often characterised by gimmicks, like blood and gore or maybe stupendous graphics. Any success there? Well, yes and no. Except for the 'yes' bit. Primal Rage's graphics may well be digitised-stop-frame-latex-model- cuddly-toy-shooby-dooby-doo-et-cetera, but in VGA they're very pixelly and very jerkily animated. (There's no SVGA mode). This looks alrightish (in a crap kind of way) at first, but after a while it starts to make your eyes hurt, especially if you give blocking-and-swiping a miss and - in a brave show of entering into the spirit of things - play the game properly and jump around a lot. I'm not sure why this has been done (the coin-op itself was a little blocky, but not nearly to this extent), but the overall effect is a little shoddy. Mortal Kombat 2 and Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo both showed that the PC is more than capable of nice, crisp high resolution visuals in fast beat-'em-ups, so it looks like the graphics artists just couldn't be bothered doing their job properly. Or maybe it was too expensive, or the dog ate the real graphics, or something. Who knows?

Great sound as a last desperate stab at a saving grace, then? Perhaps some special music by, for example, Brian May from out of Queen (as there was, of course, in Rise Of The Robots, Time Warner's last attempt at a beat-'em-up)? Well, no. The music is horrible warbly rubbish, and the sound effects were nowhere to be heard on either my or PC GAMER's machines, despite the install program claiming it had detected and utilised our Soundblasters.

All this is a bit of a shame, because there are some nice ideas in Primal Rage. For a start, when your opponent is beaten and about to fall over, you can nip in quickly with a fatality move (several of which are quite funny, too). Now, in something like Mortal Kombat, fatalities are just a way of rubbing your mate's face in it when you've won, or showing off against the computer. But in Primal Rage, an opponent killed by a fatality will be much weaker when it's resurrected for the Final Battle (the very last round, where you get a single energy bar and have to defeat all seven characters one after the other to complete the game). This is clever and good, but somewhat spoiled by the fact that weak or strong, your opponents can all be killed by a bit of blocking and swiping, so there's very little incentive to bother.

Also, having your little human followers running around, occasionally wandering into the foreground whereupon you can eat them for an energy boost, is atmospheric and neat, but since the 'eat the human' moves are the trickiest in the entire game to execute (especially during the mayhem of battle), you don't get to see it happen very often. Finally, the control system is a little bit different to the norm, which is a good thing, but it's designed for the arcade. Thus, to execute a special move you have to hold down at least two fire buttons and move the joystick, which can necessitate some very uncomfortable thumb twisting if you hold your stick/pad the way most people do (in both hands, using your thumbs rather than fingers to actually hit buttons with). Bah.

Time Warner's last attempt at a beat-'em-up, of course, was Rise Of The Robots. Maybe it'll be third time lucky, eh boys?

VERDICT: Well, it's not Rise Of The Robots, but it's not Super Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat 2 either. (Actually, if you're familiar with the Atari Jaguar, it IS Kasumi Ninja). Playable, but lumpy and dull.

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