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The Cold War might be over, but terrorists, drugs cartels and naughty secret police are still causing trouble all over the place. There's only one man (or woman, this being a unisex game) who can fight this clandestine battle, and that's freelance secret agent Max Remington.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to accompany Max on his/her ongoing crusade against criminals who operate above the law. There are 26 espionage masterminds to be brought to justice, all of whom have an entourage of agents, couriers, organisers and experts to aid their causes. Time is of the essence, and if a mastermind goes into hiding before he (or she) is arrested, they always return to continue their plan, in another part of the world with different allies.

Success in the game relies on your skills in four secret agent-type abilities: combat, driving; cryptography and electronic surveillance. At the start of the game you get four credits which you can use to give you a head start in your weaker disciplines.

Even though Max works outside the normal restraints of official security forces he has to answer to someone, and this guy is that someone. He's head man at the CIA, and as well as briefing Max and rating his progress, he also assigns him an assistant. That's Sam - the girl who has all the answers. Sam collates and assesses the evidence and can often point Max in the right direction when he's a bit stuck.

Suspect buildings are always swarming with guards, so when Max has to enter one to gather evidence or arrest someone he must prepare for combat. Start by tooling him up with up to five pieces of equipment shown on the left of the screen. Once inside, the view switches to an overhead graphic of the room you're currently exploring, complete with safes, sofas, computers and desks which can be opened, photographed or bugged if you're carrying the right gear.

If Max is watching a building and a suspect drives away from it, he can either place a homing device on the car (which requires electronics skills) or tail him with two cars chosen from a selection of four, each of which has different speed, handling and "conspicuousity" ratings. Naturally, the suspect mustn't realise that he is being followed so you have to switch between your two cars, alternately keeping one on his tail, while the other keeps out of sight and is sent ahead to pick up the tail, say, at the next junction. Successfully following a car can lead you to a new, unknown location, so don't lose track of it!

This skill is essential if Max has to place a wire-tap on a building's telephone lines, or a homing device on a car. Each microchip in the circuit allows current through in a certain direction, or blocks it along a particular path.

The idea is to selectively replace one microchip in the circuit at a time, directing the electric current away from the telephones on the right so that he can tap that line and perhaps gain a clue. Don't let any current get to the alarm bells either - if they ring and alert the guards, then you'll have to bug out real quick.

Otherwise known as codebreaking. Max often intercepts coded messages, and decoding them could reveal invaluable clues. Each letter in the encrypted message represents a real letter throughout the message, and on the easiest level one letter is revealed to get things started.

One way to do it is to experiment, replacing all three-letter encrypted words with the letter T, H and E (simply because three-letter words are most likely to be "the"), then continue from there, changing letters if things don't make sense.

I was a big fan of Sid Meier's last game, Railroad Tycoon, because somehow this guy always seems to be able to design games with a new and interesting approach to an unusual subject, and Covert Action is no different.

The four sub-games are a very satisfying mixture of strategy, puzzle and action gameplay, and the way they're been worked into the overall investigation has been cunningly devised.

The limitations of the program do show through when you've been playing a while and notice that the same faces and street names seem to crop up in different investigations, only with different names and in different towns.

But I'm happy to let that pass because it doesn't significantly affect the atmosphere, which actually gives you a taste of what it's like to live on the edge. Covert Action is pricey, but if the usual array of PC flight sims and adventures don't interest you, this is one game you will play and play way past bedtime.