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Shades of Chernobyl! As an engineer, presumably for a nuclear power plant, you have been organising the repair to its backup cooling system for the last few days.

A military underground nuclear test sets off a series of earth tremors, and the city is evacuated, but you remain in your office, which, for some reason, is on the other side of the city from the power plant.

The repair crew phone to say that the main cooling system is losing pressure, and the backup system repairs are not complete. They are pulling out - the reactor will explode in a few hours.

There is no alternative but for you to make for the planet, and carry out the repairs yourself. Here is where the adventure starts, and you find yourself trapped on the top floor of your office building. Everyone else seems to have got out. The building is deserted, and you head for the lift to make your getaway. But the power has failed, the lift is useless, and to make matters worse, there is a fire raging in the stairway.

What you do next, and how successful you are, depends very much on whether you hit upon the correct phrases. Much is made in the blurb about the full-sentence command analyser, and its rejection of grammatically incorrect input.

The trouble is, full sentences, not just two word commands, are needed to get over the first hurdle in this game, and they have to be just right.

That is not easy with a very limited vocab, and an uninformative "You can't" response. So for me, the game soon resolved itself into a word and phrase finding exercise.

Having removed a panel in the ceiling of the lift, it took me some considerable time before I hit upon CLIMB OUT OF LIFT as the only way of escape. CLIMB OUT was not accepted with a "Please rephrase that". So what chance would I have out there, faced with the immense technical problems of making a nuclear reactor safe?

Once outside the building, I was in the ruined city, amid piles of rubble and devastation, which were described in a way that nicely built up the atmosphere, though many were "empty" locations where nothing much seemed to happen.

This is a graphic adventure, and although there are relatively few pictures, and not over-colourful ones at that, they are superbly drawn.

Some are very effectively animated; for example, there is one of an oil-tanker on its side, with oil gushing out. Another depicts a pile of rubble with an arm sticking out - watch carefully and you will notice the hand opening and closing, clutching at thin air.

The graphics clear for the yellow on black text display, which scrolls up from the bottom of a blank screen. Type-ahead makes replaying at speed that much easier - once you can remember the commands.

Could have been a very good game - pity about the vocab!