Ubi Soft
£9.99/£14.99

Long ago when the people of a peaceful and prosperous land, called the Gaspards, were ruled by an old family endowed with magical powers, called the Carikens, everything was line and dandy. Did it stay that way? Not on your nelly! An evil wizard called Maldur, along with his demonic hordes, swept across the land and decimated it so quickly that the Carikens had no time to use their magical amulet to protect the land. Maldur grabbed the amulet and smashed it into 23 pieces, scattering it across the countryside.

Not to be outdone that easily Ulopa Cariken, a young hero, set out to find the pieces of the amulet and destroy the evil of Maldur. 23 horizontally scrolling levels of demon-packed action stand between our lad and the death of Maldur.

Equipped with three different types of weapons take Ulopa through the perilous scenery defeating enemy agents as he meets them - but be careful: ammo for each weapon is limited, although extra plus additional magic powers can be collected along the way.

Ulopa's adventure takes him, by entering magical doors, into the depths of the earth and further, where it all gets mighty dangerous! But hurry, Maldur has sent his minions out to find the pieces of the amulet

Graphically Twin World is very pretty, but as both the background and moving sprites are the same colour it's often difficult to spot attackers before they strike that fatal blow. Also, the graphical style can hide important elements in the game - I reached one spot and died several times before I realised there was a bridge I had to cross (fool! -Ed). Despite that, Twin World is a pleasant collect-'em-up that should prove enjoyable for arcade adventure fans, though interest may not be sustained for too long.

MARK [78%]

Twin World has all the best bits of arcade adventure games we've seen before. But does this mean that it's the best yet? No way! The first thing that puts you off are the graphics. They're all nicely drawn and detailed but are, sadly, monochrome. I know I moan about this on almost every game (I hate it!), but this is one of the worst I've seen for ages. The programmer's choice of colour doesn't help: red on a black backround is a terrible strain on the eyes! Gameplay isn't too bad: you wander around going through skulls and shooting at anything that moves with the three weapon options you've got. Twin World is fun for a short time but if your eyesight doesn't go first, boredom may soon set in.
NICK [67%]

Ubi Soft
£9.99 cass/£14.99 disk
Reviewer: Jonathan Davies

"Twin World is a praiseworthy arcade game. Very attractive, humorous, beautiful, strategic, of a very good playability. It is provided with music and sound effects of extremely good quality creating a game of the highest interest."

Nothing like a quote from the instructions to kick off a review, eh, Spec-chums? it certainly saves a few headaches at this end, I can tell you. As you may have gathered, Twin World is a French game so we're probably in for a fair dose of the customary weirdness. It popped up on the 16-bit computers a while back, and went down a treat. So let's take a look at the plot, eh?

Right, the game is set in Twin World ("a very special world to be visited immediately" we're told) where there once lived a group of people called the Gaspards. They were looked after by another bunch of people called the Carikens. and everything was fine until one day an evil druid called Maldur (which translates from the French as Not Very Well Hard, I think) came along and invaded them. Most of the Carikens were slaughtered and their magic amulet was stolen, smashed up into 23 pieces and scattered around all over the place. You can probably guess what's coming next. Yup, you survived so now you've got to collect the pieces and save the world etc.

Load it up and you'll see a scrolling side-view lobby with a suspiciously cute little character (called Ulopa) who can walk about, jump, duck, stamp his feet and fire little blobs (from a choice of three different sorts). There's a nicely detailed, but monochromatic, landscape to wander around, platforms to jump onto, things to shoot and, of course, things to collect. Nothing weird about that really. But hang on a minute, there's a door over there. Let's go through it. On crikey, the screen's changed colour and we seem to be underground or something. Very strange. Let's go through this door over here. Cor - we're back where we started, but a bit further on!

It turns out that what you've got to do is work your way through each level, flipping between the two 'worlds' when necessary, pick up a bit of the amulet and take it to the exit. Every four levels there's a big baddie to kill, but being as crap as ever I didn't quite get that far. I did, however, come across a dragon thing (on the first two levels, ahem) which took a bit of beating - when it's shot it flies apart into lots of baby dragons. It took me about three days to actually get off Level One, as the bit of amulet is pretty tricky to find until you know what it looks like. (And if you think I'm going to give you any clues, forget it, Why should I suffer alone?)

And there another thing. When you shoot baddies you'll be able to collect add-ons, like extra-high-jumps and things. These need to be brought into action at key points in the game, but you may occasionally find that you haven't got quite what you need at various points. If this happens you're meant to be able to conjure up a 'shop' where things like this can be bought. But could I figure out how to make it work? Nope.

So is Twin World actually any good? Well, the graphics are. They're only in one colour, mind, but what's there is neatly drawn and smoothly scrolling. The only slight problem is that it can be just a little bit tricky to tell what's going on at times. For instance, it's a bit hard to tell the difference between water and solid ground. One kills you and the other doesn't. which is quite an important distinction when you think about it. And there's the sound, which consists of quite a good tune and some neat spot effects. But apart from all that, is it actually worth looking at? Yes, to be quite honest. It's extremely playable, the speed everything happens at is just about right and there's enough variety to keep things rolling along nicely. It is possible to crash it, though. If you go off the right-hand side of the first level. Oops. In fact, I've just got onto Level Three, so I'm going to give it an even higher rating than I originally had in mind. I'm that chuffed.

Label: Ubisoft
Price: £9.99
Reviewer: Garth Sumpter

Sacre Blu! Those peace-loving peeps, the Gaspards are having a real bad time since their protecting overlords the Carikens were slaughtered by the evil Maldur. The Gaspards were hard a-gasp until they heard that one member of Cariken family was still alive. If he can reunite the 23 pieces of an amulet scattered throughout the land, then once more a Cariken can return the land to peace.

All sounds a bit convoluted - well that's because of the strange Frenchie idea of fun. The game? It's pretty good act-u-al-a-ment. (Hem!) The graphics although good cannot live up to the PR bumf that describes the game as having 'colourful graphics' as whilst the monochrome graphics are smooth and well detailed, they do still have only two colours with the explosion of colour happening off the actual game area.

The play takes you through 23 (count 'em) different levels, each of which holds diabolic creatures that the utterly, utterly wicked Maldur has left to bar your progress. However, you're not without a few of your own tricks up your sleeve. There are objects which you can collect as you go to build up your magical arsenal of three weapons, bonus bits like the springs of boinginess, the parachute of doom, extra lives and shields all of which are needed if you want to get past the boss monster on every forth level. There's even a shop - or rather a shopkeeper type who you can summon to you to replenish your supplies - a sort of 'Ring-A-Retailer'.

There's a lot of game here and it all works rather well. You journey above and below ground in a leap, spriong manner hurling one of the three types of spells at the nasties using the space bar to choose between varying degrees of spell strength and then hurling each one in a manner not unaccustomed to an airborne brick.

Twinworld is very much a French version of Wonderboy and is easily as challenging. Graphics are well detailed without being fussy and character animation is smooth and controllable. So, if you like the new wave 'arcade adventure' games, then Twinworld should have you smashing your porcelain piggies' head in and hoofing it down to the local games emporium in no time!