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All 720 staff have died in mysterious circumstances. Andrew Angelo affectionately known to his friends as Asteroid Andy received the distress signals but arrived there too late to do anything about it. The suspicion is that there has been an alien attack, but the only way to find out for certain is to locate the nine parts of a biological memory bank scattered around the 1,000 locations split over four levels.

Core is an icon-driven arcade adventure that sees you in the part of Andy. Apart from wandering around looking for the nine pieces, there are puzzles to be solved as well and it is intended that it will take you some considerable time before you solve everything. To this end, there is a save game facility although this only operates if you can first find a cassette to save the game on!

Graphically, the game looks very attractive with the top third of the screen containing the various icons whilst the bottom part displays you, your current surroundings and any objects and nasties that happen to be around. There are seven main boxes to keep your eyes on. Along the bottom of the icon window is a description and short message strip. Top left is a box showing the location of the various exits, although this can be toggled to a picture of the brain display using the red button next to it. Above the red button is a clock whilst to the right of it is a green button which is used to select from the four screen icon menu. Next to that is a battery indicator - your picture starts off bright white and slowly dims as your power decreases. At the right of the screen is the icon menu, this loops between a control panel (help, wait and save), an action selector (pick up, drop, use and fire), a spare batteries display and an items carried (four maximum) indicator.

The whole idea of icons is that they make the game simple to control but I found that this was just not the case here. Selecting the various icons was very much a hit-or-miss affair being controlled by a diagonal movement of the joystick and the instructions given were distinctly lacking in clarity. This is a pity because it would be a very good game if only it were considerably more playable.