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When Mike Singleton wrote Lords Of Midnight he presented the computer press with a dilemma. They knew they liked what they saw but what was it exactly, an arcade game? An adventure? Dungeons And Dragons without either the dungeons or dragons?

Mostly people hedged bets and called it an arcade strategy game.

Dark Sceptre is Mike's latest creation and it poses as many problems of description as Midnight. Arcade strategy game may have to do.

One thing is certain though, Dark Sceptre is an extraordinary program.

It begins, like all the Singleton excursions, with a story. The theme is familiar: yet another land where peace and tranquility have just been swept away by a bunch of total yobbos. The time it's the Lord of the Isles v the Northlanders no falls no submissions.

The Northlanders are the dark forces, unwittingly given power by the Lord of the Isles (a good guy with a throne of pearls, jade and amethyst) when he forges the Dark Sceptre, the most powerful weapon the mythical world. You join in when the forces of evil have just totally gained the upper hand, become completely dark and shadowy (this is very bad) and when winning is not going to be easy. Actually, it's going to be almost impossible...

Grab the Dark Sceptre and destroy it. Sounds enormously difficult? It is.

You control a company of warriors each with different skills which you must exploit. This task involves battling with the Shadow Lords and dealing with the other computer-controlled forces which begin the game in a neutral frame of mind towards you but may not stay that way depending on when you do.

Before you confront the Sceptre you need to take certain precautions lest it destroys you.

For a kick-off, you need to find out what on earth you need to do with it.

It's possible to play the game in a number of ways. It is perfectly possible for a group of people to each control a warrior and act independently through all the same side). However, you should always remember that your warriors are free to leave the company and join another should they wish. Similarly, you can recruit warriors who desert from other companies.

Fundamentally, Dark Sceptre is a strategy adventure. You issue orders to your 'troops' using your tactical judgement to decide what to do with whom at what point.

What makes the game special though is partly the range and subtlety of the orders you give and more obviously the staggeringly impressive animated graphics. The warriors in Dark Sceptre are not splodgy sprites half an inch high - they are half a screen high yet animated with almost the same smoothness as the characters in Tir Na Nog.

Every order you issue is accted out on the graphics screen by those enromous figures on a highly detailed scrolling background. The effect is astounding.

It's not just the characters that are huge. Only when you flip to the map screen do you realise just how big the game is. The playing area is 4,000 screens or so and the permutations of play are virtually limitless. With a team of warriors that may chance through recruitment or desertion at any time, you will need to be flexible about the way you play the game. Should you end up, for example, with a team considering largely of mystics, it's a good plan to avoid too much strong arm stuff. Things are far from easy to juggle. The more useful a team member is to you the more likely it is he'll be poached by one of the other teams.

Orders to your team are given using a joystick-controlled scrolling menu system. Almost all orders are directed at a particular warrior and concern his dealings with some other warrior. Some orders are generally available, others specifically require some condition to be met. To give you an idea, an order involving spellcasting will only work with a warrior possessing magical skills. All quite logical when you work it out, but pretty hairy when you're having to think on your feet.

Having issued orders to the company, you then wait for events to unfold. In a curious way, this element of the game is not unlike Football Manager in the 'managerial' excitement it generates! You think, you plan, you scheme but, as the events unfold following your actions, you keep your fingers crossed and hope you haven't done anything stupid. If so, there's nothing you can do once you set your 'move going.

Wot no Classic? Well, at the time of going to press Mike Singleton was still tweaking the final elements of the game. For that reason, we've held back on stars and Classic label. For the moment...

Imagine Tir Na Nog writ large and featuring multi- rather than single-colour graphics and you have some idea of the look of Dark Sceptre. Enormous, distinctive figures - probably the biggest sprites ever seen on the Spectrum - stride and fight their way along roads, through towns, past forests. The backgrounds are full of strange gothic details, like a statue of a cowering angel, gravestones and religious symbols. The forests are gnarled, twisted trees - all is darkness and gloom. The scrolling scene takes up the top two-thirds of the screen.

The bottom third of the picture is filled by a scroll showing current position, character under control and time of day (via a very nifty 'darkness falling' icon).

In some ways, the sound on Dark Sceptre is the biggest revelation. Somehow, Mike and his programming team have managed to include not only some incredible digitised speech at the opening of the game but stunningly realistic sound effects throughout. Somehow the Spectrum Beep is persuaded to sound like the hollow clink of steel against steel - for quite some while I assumed I was playing some special 128K version of the game which utilised that machine's enhanced sound facilities. I wasn't.

The animation when either walking or fighting - of the various warriors is flawless as is the scrolling of the background detail. Attribute problems, you ask? Not a one. Mike Singleton, master of "finding a way around seemingly impossible problems", has developed the creative use of shadow for Dark Sceptre. Each figure is surrounded by a permanent fuzzy area of black, which gives the illusion of shadow - as though the figure were lit from behind your head. As a visual illusion I'd give it seven out of ten but as a way of avoiding attribute clash it works perfectly. Brilliant.

An astounding complex game that also features the largest, most highly detailed characters ever.