Uh-oh. Partisan Spec-chums should avert their eyes from this review at once and read something else altogether, 'cos they're not going to like it. Sadly, Vendetta is one of those games which, when you compare the Speccy version to those on other formats, our wonderful machine begins to look like the 10-year-old wrinkly that it is. On the C64 (spit!) this is a lovely game, with stunning isometric-3D graphics in the style of The Last Ninja and loads of excellent, atmospheric beat-'em-up and exploring action.

On the Spectrum, though, it's a poor shadow of the original, with a less sophisticated graphic style, no colour, yukky control and crap collision detection. Add all this together and what you get at the end of the day is nothing more than an inferior Double Dragon clone with complications. Your character treks backwards and forwards through some uninspiring black-and-white landscapes, frequently appearing to walk on top of or right through the supposedly-solid scenery. Occasionally a baddie wanders along and stands in one place for a while, waiting for you to come up and punch him a dozen or so times until he falls down, whereupon he's replaced by another one, and so on until you simply walk off the screen.

If you can be bothered, you can punch down doors and crowbar the lids off crates and so on to find weapons and other useful artefacts, but for what purpose is never really explained, certainly not by the useless instruction manual. Dogged perseverance eventually gets you into a reasonably lively driving-game shoot-'em-up sequence, but it's a short-lived respite and you're soon back to the dull, dull, dull exploring'n'punching malarkey, at which point you're more than likely to swear half-heartedly in indifferent distaste for a few seconds and then send the whole thing flying in a lazy yet elegant arc into the bin to lie beside the shattered wreckage of the Navy Moves tape. Well, that's what I did, anyway. Life's far too short to spend it forcing yourself to get to grips with this kind of thing.

35%

BLIM!

One of the most celebrated vendettas in history is that of a mysterious man identifying himself only as 'Snickers McGinty', who spent 15 years repeatedly taking all the mail sent to him and putting it back in the post box in an attempt to bankrupt the GPO. Unfortunately, before anyone could find out why, he accumulated such a mass of it that his front door became completely blocked by letters and he died of starvation.