This game is going to go down in history as one of the greatest of all time. It is absolutely fantastic in every respect - graphics, sound, everything. This could be a record - Ben getting through a game review without absolutely hacking the poor thing to bits!

I do not know where to start! Near the beginning would probably be a option, so sit comfortably and I will begin.

It is a sort of platformy thing but not, and it is a sort of collect a lot thingy, but not really. The closest thing it is Sonic the Spikey Haired Git of a Hedgehog, but this knocks the socks off Sonic.

The whole thing is completely manic from beginning to end. When you boot up the game there are various sequences going on in the background and a soundtrack that is similar to, well nothing apart from Mr Bungle or Frank Zappa.

There is everything flying round the screen leaving you completely baffled as what is going on, and it is wonderful.

The bit that really impressed me was the Options menu. You can change the difficulty level which makes it harder for the nasties on-screen to bump you off.

Next there is the music selector. I am one of a dying breed - a person who likes funk music. What did I happen to find on the selector? A funk track. At first I was a bit dubious, but then I actually heard it and it was proper funk music which really made my day.

Along with the funk music are rock and rave settings and something called Green Bizarre. Then you have an Inertia setting so old Zool does not go from standing still to 100mph instantly, and a Continue option.

My god this is serious, I have not even got to the game yet and I am already raving. Let us scuttle along, children, in a crab-like fashion.

As you see from the screenshots, our matey Zool is an odd looking character, a bit like an ant I though, but an agile little chappie anyway.

The various levels all have themes. The first level's theme is sweets, with all the beasties look like dolly mixtures of fruit gums and all the backgrounds being jellies or lollies. The end-of-level baddie steals the show - a mishmash of all manner of sweets that spits liquid at our hero.

The baddies do all sorts of things to try and stop you on your way, but Zool is armed and dangerous and a ninja from the Nth dimension (which is just near Bob's Discount Bean Bag Emporium, if you must know). To get around the levels a lot of time you have to go up cliffs. You can't actually climb them but you can sort of jump off and up and back on again - quite cunning really

Apart from the climbing there is not much to your movement on the screen but for jumping and running. The aim is to reach the end of each level by simply piling through all the nasties.

Unlike Sonic you do not always progress in the same direction. In the bottom left-hand corner there is a pointer which tells you which direction to go in. At the end of each level there is the customary baddie, which does take a little doing.

To bump off all the beasties you have bullets of a sort and a sword. But old Zool can only use his sword while flying through the air, spinning. It sounds like a bit of a handicap, but it is frightfully effective when wasting wine gums.

To help you along the way there are a few power-ups which you can get get, like shields and so on. My favourite is the yin-yang which creates another Zool who follows you around. He fires at the same time you do and basically does the bizz.

I stumbled across a bonus level which is a shoot-'em-up sort of thing where you can pick up extra energy and things. I kept getting chased afterwards by these clouds - it gave me quite a funny turn, y'know. It reminded me of Project X a bit which is another of my fave games.

There are some really nice touches - for instance, on the second level (the music level) there are notes which come out of the saxophone and which you can ride on. There is also a big piano to walk along. It is this sort of detail that makes the game so special.

My one and only niggle about Zool is the difficulty. It is a very tricky game, but this is combated by the Continue function - vital to your progression through the levels.

As I said earlier, Zool will be around for a long time. It is one of the most original games I have seen on the Amiga. If you buy a game this week, buy Zool - you won't regret it.

You may have heard about Zool, you may even have read reviews of it in other magazines. But you're not stupid enough to believe everything you read, are you? The truth of the matter is, Zool was finished four days before Amiga Format was due to be printed. Now normally, that late in our schedule it's too late to change anything, but we were so impressed with Zool that we had a quick reshuffle of our pages and shoehorned it into this already packed issue. So remember kiddies, this is the latest, greatest and the most up-to-date review of Zool you'll ever read. In fact, it's the first review of the finished game ever to see print.

Expensive PD Demo?
You know as well as I do that £25.99 is a lot of money to pay for a game. You wouldn't buy a record just on the strength of the sleeve (unless it was a Madonna disc maybe), so why buy a game on the strength of the screenshots? So let's play it shall we?

Well, the intro's good. I like this, a funky fresh soundtrack and some ultrafast scrolly visuals, this is as good as a PD demo, and only costs about 20 times as much. Now I'm getting a message, what does it say? 'Prepare Yourself', OK, if you say so, but what for, what do I need? Some string? A ten pence piece in case I need to make a phone call? Ah! A joystick and a comfy chair will see me right. Let's press fire...

Like, totally intense dude!
Whoa! The first thing you realise is that it's psychedelically intense, man, and stupendously bright. Now I understand what the 'Prepare Yourself' stuff was all about. First thing, install a pair of shades. That's better. Oakley's in place and I can bear to look at the screen without squinting. We are talking the most outrageously colourful graphics to ever be seen on the screen, and that includes any screen, SNES and Megadrive included.

So! This Zool dude, who is he anyway? It says here that he's a 'Ninja of the Nth Dimension' and who I to argue? He looks like a ninja to me, he's got one of those red scarfs tied over his eyes and everything. And he can do all those mystical ninja tricks, he considers the Tumo Heat, says a few mantras and ngags and the next thing you know he's leaping all over the place kicking and punching and shouting Hai!

And boy is he fast. Oh! You don't know do you, 'cos you haven't seen him yet. Well, let me tell you, he is fast. There's all this talk about Zool being Gremlin's sonic beater. Well he's not quite that fast, but he is very fast. Makes Mario look like he's on Mogodon, that's for sure. He looks good too, his arms and legs are a bit skinny, but I'm sure that just helps him to move quicker. I mean, you don't see many fat ninjas running around do you? They'd be sumos instead.

Zool's got to fight his way across seven worlds of fiendish foes, all of them things that you'd never expect to have an evil side. He begins by fighting sweets, yes sweets, or candy for those of you who've been watching too much American TV. As he runs across a world of chocolate smartie cake and jelly, Zool has to fight off Jelly Lumps and Chocolate Spikes. By ninja spinning at the top of lollipops he can release a shower of edible goodies to be collected, each of which yield 100 points.

There really isn't a lot more to it than that: you run, you jump, you kick your way through six worlds of high-speed mayhem. Sure, there's the occasional tricky bit, but we're not talking true 'put your thinking cap on' puzzles here, just bits of the game that require a less than direct approach to reach your destination.

There are areas of the Tool World that need gates activating, but by and large this is a straight-ahead, seat-of-your-pants blast. And fast is the way to play it. The game design is not so fiendish as to place perils just out of sight so when you take a flying leap into the unknown you land on a sea of spikes or fall down an abyss. The levels are so well put together that you can make the most of the game's extreme speed and smoothness.

The way to get the most from Zool is to put your brain in neutral, turn your reactions up to maximum and go for it. This is a mega-fast, mega-vast mega-blast. From the start of Sweet World to the very end of the game, you can't let your attention slip for a second, the baddies keep coming, the terrain just keeps being a little trickier than you'd hoped, those slopes being a little slippier than you'd imagined and those damned baddies just keep regenerating every time you retrace your steps.

Who needs hedgehogs...
If not for the pause mode it would all be too much for a normal human to take (I mean you need a can of Coke every now and then, and you need to get rid of fluid occasionally too), but this is no territory for normal humans.

Here we are deep in the arcade zone, the land of the player hardened by years of joystick wielding. This is a game that can hold its head up and look the consoles right in the eye. Yes, this is the game that makes Sonic and Mario look like the sad creations of teams of deluded child psychologists that they are. Sonic's got the speed, Mario has the size and the gameplay, Zool's got both. And when you're bored with playing games (and it will take you an age and a half to get bored of Zool) I'd like to see you use a console to digitise some pictures or write a hit record.

Let's face it, if Sonic was being reviewed in Amiga Format it would get ooh, about 91 per cent, sure that's good, but when you compare it to Zool's massive... ah, but that would be telling. You'll have to read on to find out, so don't cheat and go looking at the bottom of the page ahead of time. The only excuse for anyone to buy a console now would be Gremlin developing Zool for the GameGear.

The game is far from faultless though, it would have been nice to see a few more puzzles, it would've been nice to be rewarded for obscure things like only collecting every fifth pick up. In short, it could have more depth. But as soon as you begin to play, any reservations you may have had evaporate in an instant. Let's face it, you just don't have time to play puzzle games when you're fighting caustic cuties at this frenetic piece.

Some people, our ex-Screenplay Editor Trenton Webb for one, criticise this type of game for not being intellectually stimulating enough, but by and large those kind of people who stay at home playing chess rather than going out hang-gliding. (I must apologise right now for implicating Trent in this vicious slur on couch potatoes, because he would be the first to jump off a tall building tied to nothing but an elastic band).

But what I am try to say is, No! This isn't an intellectually stimulating game, it's an exciting game. Possibly, no definitely the most exciting game ever seen on the Amiga, which is itself the most exciting computer ever. Which means, if I've done my sums right, that Zool is the... roll of the drums, most exciting computer game ever. Yes, there I've gone and said it. Any complaints, send them on a postcard to Amiga Power at this address, cause I really don't wanna know. This is the one brothers and sisters, the game that kicks out all the jams, the most unrelenting-computer gaming experience this side of the virtual orgasm.

Zool is nothing new
Hell, I know I should really say more about the game, but what is there to say, you've seen dozens of games like this before. You shoot at things, you punch things, you kick things, and they die. Every so often the things you punch and kick turn into goodies, and you collect the goodies and you get points, and if you finish a level in a fast time then you get points for that too, and after three levels there is a Boss, and he's big and tough and you have to kill him too. And there are power ups, and it isn't always to get from A to B, so you have to take a round-about route, and No! No! It all sounds so mundane doesn't it.

I wish I could tell you that Zool breaks the mould, banishes the tedium, redefines the cutesy platform concept, but it doesn't. It conforms in every way to what you'd expect from a perfect cutesy platform game. And in doing so it has become the perfect platform game. If I were to go on Desert Island Floppies this would have to be right there with the Smashing Pumpkins album and a copy of Breakfast of Champions as one of the things I could not live without. Oh! And a ruddy great solar cell to power my Amiga with, too.

In fact Zool is so conformist that it even goes along with the current trend of having sub games. For those new to this term a sub game is a computer game that simulates piloting an underwater military vessel (No it's not, stop being sill and get on with it - Ed).
A sub game really is another game, subsidiary to the main game, but contained within it. And Zool has two. The first is level seven, or Shoot-em-up World as Gremlin have imaginatively called it. but, rather than being an arcade action game it's a shoot-em-up.

Being level seven you might expect it to become before level eight, but there isn't a level eight. So Gremlin, being bright chaps, thought they should find somewhere else to put it. In the end they hid it, and not just in one place where you might stand a sporting chance of finding it, but all over the place. So you might be tearing along fighting murderous marbles in Toy World when you will suddenly be transported by a chrono-synclastic infundibulum to a horizontally scrolling shoot-em-up. If this happens, do not adjust your set, normal service will resume as soon as you get killed.

Melody Maker and NME
The options screen at the start of Zool lets you select the soundtrack. The musicless sound effects are excellent, and really help you tell what's going on in the game, but the other audio tracks are excellent too, you can choose from rave, rock, green and funk. The rave track is the best for an in-game soundtrack, but the best music of all is the stuff they play over the 'Get Ready' screen. And while this is playing you get a cute little metallic robot voice telling you to... get ready.

These screens also feature a subtle but witty backdrop that scrolls behind the test at an amazing rate. It isn't the intro screens that matter though. Excellent as they are, it's the game they sandwich between them that we are here to pay homage to. If you like things cute and colourful, you'll love this, and if you aren't predisposed to platform games you'll still love it. If you don't you need an analyst for your deep-seated alienation complex.

If you only buy one game this year... you aren't spending enough on computer software.

For the last few months those nauseating little console owners have been raving about how good their machines are compared to the likes of the Amiga. You know the sort. They are all the same. Talk about games and all they can say is 'Sonic is this fast,' or 'I can do this on Mario'. These sad types who are obviously in need of a holiday in Yugoslavia can brag no more. The age of the hedgehog is over, the age of the ninja ant is here.

'A what?' I hear you ask. Yep, a ninja ant. What do you mean, 'That's ridiculous'? If Ninja Turtles can make a killing, the rest of the animal kingdom were bound to try to elbow in on the action. This is one ninja, though, who is taking second place to no-one, especially a smug blue spiky thing and a fat old Italian plumber. Those of you who think that Gremlin can only produce great racing games are in a for a shock, 'cos Zool is a platform blaster that makes others pale into insignificance.

So what does our friendly neighbourhood ant have to do? Well, Zool has been charged with the task of travelling through seven worlds collecting items and killing bad guys (wow that's original), just the same old sort of stuff that's all in a day's work for a super hero. In Zool you have to run, jump, and er, oh yeah, shoot. What do you mean you want to know more? Isn't that enough for you? Alright, alright. Just because I'm a nice guy (and this has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that I have the rest of these pages to fill), I'll tell you all about it.

LOOK MUM, NO FILLINGS
Zool, the magnificANT, (You're fired - Ed.) is facing a tough challenge. His first trial is the Sweet World where the sweets fight back. Wild liquorice pokers and chocolate spiky Harolds are on the rampage. As if that was not enough there are sweets lying all over the place, and being the sweet toothed ant that you are, you want them all, and you want them now. Indeed, you NEED them now, because if you do not collect a set number of sweets (or other artifacts, depending on which worlds you are in - on the music level you have to pick up records and musical instruments, on the tool level you have to get nails and screws, and so on and so forth), you won't be allowed through the level's exit, no many how many meanies you have murdered.

CONSOLE-ATION PRIZE
Speed is the name of the game in Zool. The ant is fast-moving even on normal mode and, if you want a real laugh, just try him on fast mode. Yeah right, very funny. In fact, the choice of speeds is just one of a pretty impressive set of options you get at the start of the game. Following Apidya's lead in taking a console-like approach to presentation. Zool lets you choose one of three difficulty levels, one of two speed settings, the number of continues you want (up to a maximum of five), and even whether you want inertia on your character or not.

The seven levels are divided into three stages but luckily at the start they are pretty linear, i.e. in a straight line. On later levels things really get complicated and you have to go all over the place looking for your goals. For an example, check out Music World. It is the prime example how a level should be. None of this straight-line run-to-the-right nonsense. It's up, down and all around before you know what's happening. This is the stuff good games are made of.

All the levels look very cutesy. In fact Zool owes more than a pasing nod to both Robocod and (especially) Harlequin, but don't take that to mean it's a rip off. The superlative graphics, breathtaking speed and awesome playability take this head and shoulders above the rest.

The graphics are detailed enough to look interesting and hold your attention but not so detailed that the game speed suffers. The anti-ant adversaries range from the 'oh look, what a cute blob' to 'Oh my god, what the *$## is that? Simple but devastatingly effective, Zool looks as good as any arcade platform game (and that's exactly what it is, with none of Harlequin's more adventure-like elements) you can think of.

TOUGHER THAN THE REST
Platform games often suffer from being five minute wonders. (How many people have shelled out hard cash for games only to either get bored with them or complete them in the five minutes flat? Too many, that's for sure).

I am more than happy to Zool is an exception to this rule. With a total of 21 stages to complete, you have really got your work cut out, and the stages aren't short either. Some might feel, in fact, that it is too tough. But with up to five continues and restart points to find in all the levels it will prove a challenge, but not an unassailable one.

As if the length of the stages was not bad enough, there is a monster guardian waiting for your undivided attention at the end of each level and these guys have not spent any time in charm school. To top it all there are some pretty cunning secret rooms lying around.

Some you will probably find by pure luck (I know I did) while others need some thought, like playing the right tune on a piano keyboard or jumping on blocks in a certain order (here's one place where you really see the Harlequin influence). Others are a bit more obvious. Why else would a big golden question mark the floating in mid air? An omen perhaps?

As you would expect from a game as frantic as this, the sound effects are not exactly laid-back and relaxed. You get four choice of music, but you can, of curse, elect to play with no music at all to get the full effect of those lovely sound effects.

It won't win many prizes for originality, so what is it about Zool that makes it so damn good? Well with graphics guaranteed to raise a smile and gameplay so addictive you will get withdrawal symptoms when you stop, it cannot fail to be a hit. It is not just one of those run and jump games (although there is a lot of that in there, obviously), you have to clamber up walls, slide down slopes and generally do a little bit more than you would expect from a platform game.

It is fast, tough and kicks the ass of certain games featuring certain characters I could mention. Fans of Harlequin will freak over this, and if you are not a fan of that game then try it anyway, you will be very pleasantly surprised.

"Slightly Round With No Trousers Parts." That was the original pitchy description which the marketing bods at Gremlin came up with for Zool, before they settled on "The Ninja Of The Nth Dimension". No doubt they decided that a leading sprite who wasn't anatomically correct was actually no real selling point. Still, he may be as clean and smooth as an Action Man, 'down there', but he's fully functional everywhere else (which is just as well, since his mission takes him through seven different worlds, each crammed with puzzles, hidden rooms and baddies).

NINJA MAGIC

Zool also has a selection of spells up his close-fitting black sleeves. He can cast these to help him out of a tight corner. You only get a limited number, but there are spares to be found lying around and you can save them up for a rainy day. They include not only the obligatory high-jump, shields and smart bomb, but also a dead handy 'body double' who appears and follows him around, providing the firepower.

Apparently Gremlin have spared no expense working out all the fine detail to this power-up, hiring a genuine Tibetan monk as philosophical adviser. So when they say this temporary twin is the Ying to Zool's Yang, you know it's not just hot hair. Think of him as the Richard to Zool's Judy, however, and you'd probably be nearer the mark.

NINJA MOVES

Not only can our mysterious masked hero run, climb walls and hang from the ceiling, but he can kick, punch and chuck a mean shuriken. His party piece, however, is when he whips out a naked blade and pirouettes around like a regular Moulinex - chopping, kneading and dicing as he goes. All in all he has enough slick moves to make Bruce Lee look about as agile and deadly as Harold Bishop..

Well I never - Zool's very fast, dead easy to pick up and totally, totally addictive. In fact it has a definite consoley feel to it - one might even say a certain hedgehoggy feel (if you get my drift). Through Gremlin would no doubt purport to not caring if Sonic were to end up as roadside pizza, the two games do have a similar atmosphere and that certain playable style. In fact as well as gracing the Amiga and ST, there's a distinct possibility of Zool eventually appearing on a console near you. You jammy swine, you.

Zool - Ninja of the Nth dimension, hedgehog-beater and self-proclaimed mascot for the Amiga - caused a sensation last year, hitting the charts big time and staying at number one for a Bryan-Adams-ly long time. At last a character to give Amigans someone to champion, and supposedly one who could beat up both Sonic and Mario in a fight (if any of them actually existed).

For those of you who have been living in a bubble for the last year, Zool is a platform game covering six different world, with three stages to each world. Zool himself is your man, and you control him on his quest to get off a planet that he's crash-landed on.

The standard version of Zool impressed many with its speed and scrolling, so presumably this version is even more impressive. What does it have to offer over its predecessor then? Well, on loading you're treated to a very impressive intro screenshot which obviously makes use of the extended palette of the A1200, but this has nothing to do with the game and is really of only passing interest.

Once into the game itself, you're aware of the two main additions to this enhanced version. The first is a much more colourful background with parallaxing effects to boot. All the levels are given this enhancement, with graphics that suit the theme of each world. Now, it's questionable as to whether this is really an enhancement.

Personally I don't give a damn whether something has excellent parallaxing effects unless it enhances the game itself, and I'm sorry to say that it doesn't in this case. Quite the reverse in fact. They may look pretty in these screenshots but, on the early levels especially, they're incredibly cluttered when they're scrolling and it makes it harder to see what's actually going on in the game.

This is a matter of taste perhaps, but when the screen gets full of sprites it seems that even the A1200 can't cope with it all, and the animation drags a little. I was expecting the game to run a lot smoother and faster than its unenhanced predecessor, but it didn't. In fact, it even seemed a bit slower in places, presumably because of the extra colours and backgrounds it has to deal with.

You'll remember that I said there were two enhancements. The other is the sound, which benefits from a few extra sound samples - the bees hum now, the drums thump, things pop all over the place. Well, you know, it's fine but it didn't particularly enhance my enjoyment of the game.

Zool itself is a great game, but I actually enjoyed this 1200 version less than the original. The enhancements are purely cosmetic, and in some parts of the game actually detract from the gameplay. The original runs on the 1200, with a few glitches, but you might be better off going for it instead of this.

From the breathtaking intro the end of World Seven, you know you are playing one heck of a game. Zool is very fast, very furious and filled with all kinds of psychedelic obstacles and baddies for you to overcome.
Widely touted as a console-beater when first released, the triumphant arrival of Zool on the CD32 should help establish the machine as a viable game-playing format and consign pretenders like the lacklustre Oscar to the bargain bins of history.

The aim of the game is to get the "Protector of Creative Thought and Defender of Positive Action" through seven themed worlds - Sweet, Music, Fruit, Tool, Toy, Funfair and Shoot-em-up - collecting bonuses and zapping a motley collection of baddies as you go.

Zool CD32 plays like an absolute dream. You are hooked within the first couple of minutes of play as the scorchingly fast Ninja leaps from platform to platform. There are lots of great touches - like the ability to cling to the side of objects - and his spinning bamboo attack puts even the toughest baddies in their place.

As well as (obviously) including the enhanced graphics and sound effects on the AGA version, Gremlin have also added some marvellous 3D animated sequences and a selection of - hey! - real music for you to blast through your stereo.

All in all, Zool is an incredibly slick, day-glo platformer with a real sense of character. You are hooked into his Technicolor world right from the word go and it is almost impossible to put the controller down. The pace is frenetic and you can make Zool move even faster by toggling the Inertia and Speed settings on the Options screen. There are three difficulty levels too.

Controlling Zool is simplicity itself. Press the Red button on the joypad to make him jump, the Green button to fire and both together for a baddie-beating leap. The D-pad is used for Zool's eight other gravity-defying moves.

No game is perfect, though, and Zool has more than its fair share of faults. For one thing, the backgrounds are so overwhelmingly colourful at times that it is hard to tell what is in the foreground. This means you end up being clobbered by baddies you thought were part of the scenery and the sight of Zool pirouetting madly from platform to platform against such a distracting backdrop can actually make you feel quite ill.

I also hate the way baddies keep coming back to haunt you no matter how many times you kill them.
However, these are minor niggles in an otherwise cracking platform game. Rush out and get yourself a copy today.