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The button has been pressed. Leaders are hurried into underground bunkers, where they orchestrate retaliatory strikes. All television and radio stations broadcast the three-minute warning, and everyone knows that they've just three precious minutes of life left.

In the unlikely event of anyone deciding to pass their final minutes playing Bravo Romeo Delta, they'll probably give up with about one-and-a-half minutes to go before mutually assured destruction.

It's a simulation of a nuclear war where the aim is not just to obliterate your opponents, but also to ensure that democracy prevails when the carnage is over. This means that escalation control - the bonkers American notion of keeping a nuclear conflagration "limited" - is crucial. The game's got the potential to be tense and atmospheric, but a combination of badly-written instructions, shoddy presentation, and unexciting text-based interfaces leaves it limping and coughing up blood like some irradiated, microwaved survivor.

The inescapable problem is that the game does nothing to draw you into its world, and both the game and its manual fail to provide you with any indication about what is going on.

Fans of the apocalypse and ex-Strategic Air Command employees may fancy trawling through the tedium to feed their own twisted hobby, but for everyone else: Syndicate and Flashback are on budget. But them and spent your final three minutes moving down bystanders, while cursing the faceless bureaucrats who got you into this mess.

There are hundreds of classic mass-destruction games on budget. This plays like a dead kitten. Go figure.