Last Bronx

Its Been A While Since We Saw Adecent beat 'em up on the PC. And this is a more than decent beat 'em up, with just about everything you could wish for. It's set in the spookily feasible near future, in which the Japanese economy has collapsed and gangs now roam Neo Tokyo, beating the shit out of one another. They soon get bored and decide to settle things with a tournament. So off we go on a roller-coaster ride to Fractured Skullsville...

Take your pick

There are all the usual options - Arcade mode (pretend you're in an arcade, except it's not costing you a fiver a minute), Survival mode (take people on one at a time, but your energy isn't replenished between bouts).

Team Battle (ruck mob-handed, tag team-style) and PC mode (a story-telling mode in which you watch Manga-style movies about your character's life between bouts). You can also fight two-player on the same machine or over a serial link, and up to six-player rumbling action is yours for the asking with a LAN or modem.

Where's your tool?

If you haven't seen a beat 'em up for a year or so, you'll be pleasantly surprised by how much less American beat 'em up types have become. There isn't a Miami Vice haircut or shiny jacket with the sleeves rolled up in sight There's also a marked lack of enthusiasm for turning up unarmed - basically, everyone's tooled up.

The characters - there are eight of them - are great. Among them there's Lisa, who basically lets you (finally) get to beat up Baby Spice; Nagi, another blonde chick, whose weapon of choice appears to be two kebab skewers; and Zaimoku, a monster with a dyed goatee beard who is wielding either, a) a very big mallet indeed, or b) a sofa on the end of a scaffolding pole. There's also Kurosawa, who - as befits a man named after a film director - seems to prefer to beat people over the head with a tripod; and most unorthodox of all there's Yoko, who enjoys attacking people with two sawn-off legs from an IKEA coffee table.

It's done in a 3D stylee - except the camera sticks to a side-on view at all times. But you can jump up onto walls, and roll in and out of the screen. And other cool stuff.

Ho ho ho

Basically, it's a great laugh. At the easiest level, you can get quite a way through it just by hitting buttons quickly, but there are over 40 moves per character to learn as you get more skilled. You'll do better if you have a decent gamepad or two, of course, but it's quite playable even with two keyboard-using players. The Manga-style presentation is cool, and is for once echoed in-game, with the characters looking the same as in the movies. Refreshingly, all the female characters have their tits well covered. The LAN and modem multi-player options are a bonus - and probably safer than playing two-up on the same machine, which always escalates into real violence. All you have to do now is convince some other PC users to buy it.