Here's a novel variation on the old Lemmings theme. You play Kevin Codner, a man for whom integrity and bravery are so much a part of his make-up that they might as well be his middle names. As you read the intimate interview with the man whose very actions you'll soon be controlling, you realise the scale of your mission.

The SS Lucifer is, you see, sinking, and full of Dim Passengers, all with a marked dislike of rapidly rising waters. Your job is to guide them safely from where they enter each compartment to the exit. Sounds pretty similar to Lemmings still, doesn't it?

There are differences, though. For a start, Kevin is an actual character who has nothing to do with Dim Passengers. You can't make the passengers actually do anything like you can Lemmings - actions are controlled by a number of means apart from the passengers themselves, about which more later.

Also, the Dim Passengers might be lacking enough of the grey stuff to snatch the chair of MENSA from Sir Clive, but they have not got a pathological desire to end it all in the same way that our cliff-loving chums of old have.
Indeed, they'll do everything they can to run away from the rising waters when they come across them.

Oh, and control is not via a crosshair and a mouse, but by the more conventional joystick and Fire button approach, your button being used to set off bombs, pick things up and so on.

So, we've established that, although based on the Lemmings idea, Sink or Swim has enough going for it to warrant consideration in its own right, so consider it we will.

Let's take a wander through the average level, shall we? Kevin appears, followed very shortly by a number of Dim Passengers. They're big, chunky affairs, and there aren't that many of them to look after. At the bottom of the screen are a load of statistics which it certainly pays to keep your eye on - especially the one that tells you how much oxygen you've got left. There are windows for passengers to be saved, lives, and how much time is left on the fuses of any bombs you've planted.

JETPAC TO SAFETY
Various objects can be utilised as mentioned earlier. Jetpacs are very useful - when you pull them off the wall, they drop into any rising waters which have stranded passengers in it, allowing the passengers to jetpac to safety, or the top of the screen - whichever comes first!

There's cargo knocking around, which you use to make bridges and platforms to complete an escape route for your passengers, but conversely it can get in the way, hindering the essential route to the chute, in which case you can move it.

Burst pipes shoot out fatal steam of thousands of degrees, but you can crawl along them and seal them... all with your Fire button!

There are various hazards apart from the water-based ones, crushers do just that to anything that gets in their way, for instance. May other helps, hindrances and curious objects knock around the various levels - swinging chains, magnetic hoists, electric fields, crew lifts - all have their uses, and those that don't teach you to avoid them very quickly indeed. There's even an emergency life-raft for when things are all going horribly wrong.

Graphically the game is a couple of years behind its time, with clumsy, not particularly well animated sprites - although it must be said that the water effects are quite impressive, especially the wobbly reflection of the Lucifer in the title screens. But the movement of the characters does let it all down a little, as does their rather pedestrian speed.

Soundwise too it's OK, with some admittedly very nice water effects, but again it seems to be a couple of years behind its time - the theme tune reminds me of one of the better PD music demo disks.

SIMPLISTIC MAGIC
As far as the gameplay goes, it's a nice idea and a credible attempt to deviate from the Lemmings idea, but like so many copied games, the more it deviates, the more it seems to lose some kind of simplistic magic. It feels rather cluttered with too much superfluous stuff going on.

This has the effect of making it hard deciding exactly what's happening, which in turn makes it hard to settle back into some serious, contemplative, Pause-on puzzle-type thinking as one could do with great pleasure in Lemmings.

So, the presentation is OK, the idea - albeit borrowed - is an excellent one, and the sound and graphics are passable but nothing special.

It's the kind of game that, should you have a particular maritime bent, you'll enjoy, but for the average gamesplayer, I'd say that there's a lot of far slicker, smoother and more exciting stuff around. Sink or swim? This one's struggling to tread water, I'm afraid.

Set squarely between Kevin Dances With Wolves Costner and James Robocod Pond, comes a new video game hero, Kevin Codner. He has all the playability of Pond, but unfortunately he also sports the charisma of Costner.

Kevin, the fishy one... erm the one that wasn't in The Bodyguard that is, is the heroic type, so when the cruise ship SS Lucifer runs into an iceberg the size of doughboy and sustains damage enough to affect its floatworthiness, there's nothing for him to do except board his trusty submersible and head straight for the scene of the disaster.

In best Irwin Allen movie tradition, the compartments of the ship are packed to the gills with panicking passengers. Kevin, erm... the fishy one not the one that was in The Gunrunner that is, has to rescue them before they perish horrifically.

That sinking feeling
When a 'Dim Passenger' falls from a platform and hits the next piece of solid ground, the direction he then goes in is totally unpredictable. The manual would have it that the passengers are panicking, but they aren't, they're just poorly programmed.

The wreck is in shipping water and in Rainbow Islands fashion, the rising tide makes for an effective time limit on many of the levels. So what we have is a basic platform puzzler, not entirely unlike Troddlers or PushOver (or any other platform puzzler).

So what distinguishes this one from the other hoards of similar programs? Nothing actually. On the upside it's nicely animated, easy to control and is pretty addictive. On the downside it makes no use of an additional disk drive, the program accesses the floppy at the start and finish of every level, and there's no way, short of dying, to re-start a level after you've mucked it up.

The levels are short, and none too sweet. It's a simple matter of trying every lever and hoping for the best, because once you pause the game you can't 'take a look around' the level to test the lie of the land. Once you're playing, if you don't do the right thing pretty quickly you end up losing too many passengers to be able to complete the level.

If the number of remaining passengers left alive falls below the number you require to finish the level, the lights go out. Great so what do you do then? There's no way of finishing a level early and re-trying it, even when you know you've nobbed it.

If Kevin, erm... that's the fishy one, not the one who was in Robin Hod, does manage to get enough passengers to safety, and make sure he gets Shelley Winters out alive, then an escape hatch miraculously opens and whisks him away, amid an abundance of disk accessing, to the next level.

Sleep with the fishes
The game isn't totally without its redeeming features, some of the puzzles are a challenge, without being completely unsolvable. This leads to the game being quite compelling, but the long load times also make you want to tear your hair out while you can complete, but you're not just quite sure how.

Every level has an access code, so you don't have to play through the whole thing every time, which is a good thing because with this much disk accessing you could be there all day if you had to.

Unless you read the manual, some of the features are a bit obscure. Even once you've read the blurb, the first magnetic hoist is placed at the top of a ladder, so when you try to use it, you end up descending the star rather than working the lever.

Let's face it, we're talking Lemmings. This is just a Lemmings rip off. Sure, the perils are different, the obstacles aren't the same, but the concept is Lemmings. Unfortunately, Sink or Swim can't boast its cuteness or playability.

Kevin Codner is without any sort of charisma and he has no endearing quirks. He doesn't even get killed by his own bombs if he stands next to them as they detonate. If he had, it would have been a giggle, and a way of getting off a stalemate level.

You might quite like Sink or Swim, who knows, you might even love it. But one thing's for sure, if it gets you tearing your hair out, it won't just be with frustration at not being able to solve the puzzles.

Just in case you're as stupid as I am, the pun in this game's sub-title ("Starring Dim Passengers") is, of course, a Kim Basinger gag. Yeah, I know, it looks obvious written down, but it completely eluded me for days, so I thought I'd save you the head-scratching.

Get past the awful jokes (the hero of this aquatically-themed game is called Kevin - oh be still my aching sides - Codner), and you find that Sink or Swim is a platform-based puzzle game with a number of distinct similarities to Krusty's Super Fun House.

You're a troubleshooter on board of a sinking passenger liner, and you have to save the 'Dim Passengers' of the title by guiding them through escape hatches to safety. (Obviously. They'd be pretty crap escape hatches if they led to a tank full of piranha fish, or something).

To help and hinder you, there're various items and bits of machinery to negotiate or manipulate, and the whole thing takes place over 60 levels (of obviously) increasing difficulty.

So far so peachy, then, but there's a flying fish in the ointment. Your character (I refuse point blank to use that terrible, terrible name) move in blocks, rather than pixels. That is to say, graphically he moves in pixels, but one move of the joystick moves him several pixels at a time.

What this means in practice is that when, say, you're climbing a ladder, the slightest twitch of the stick to the left or right will make the character walk unstoppably off the side of the ladder and fall to the bottom again. Now, considering this is a game which calls for some fairly speedy manoeuvring around the screen once you get past the first few levels, that's a flaw which isn't just irritating, but utterly wall-nuttingly infuriating.

The controls in general are really skittish and over-responsive - just a little bit of calming down would have resulted in a lovely, playable feel, but the way it is at the moment you simply haven't got a chance after level ten or thereabouts - well, not unless take the rather extreme measure of soldering up the diagonals on your joystick.

The is so close to being a really nice platform puzzler that it hurts - the difficulty curve's good, there's just the right number of elements to manipulate to stop it getting too repetitive (and each new one gets introduced with a nice simple 'teaching' level), and the actual puzzles are well designed.

It could be better than Krusty's Super Fun House, but the sloppy and infuriating controls all but scupper it. When it comes to the crunch, the puzzles themselves are hard enough without your character leaping all over the place of his own volition.