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As chief of security at a top secret research centre, you are already in considerable hot water as a group of terrorists have bypassed your security system and planeted a series of bombs, timed to detonate in sequence over a short period of time. As if that wasn't enough, they have also reprogrammed the guards to attack everything on sight. Your only hope of regaining some of your lost credibility is to send in a team of deactivating droids and get rid of the bombs as quickly as possible.

The building is on five levels and each one must be cleared in turn. At the bottom of the screen is a map showing the layout of the floor together with the location of your droids and the bombs. A series of icons can be used to select a specific droid and also to view any two adjacent rooms. These are drawn in 3-D perspective and show details of all the exits and objects present.

Clearing the level of bombs is no easy matter and there are several problems confronting the droids. Not the least of these is that they are limited in which rooms they have access to and this results in one droid having to pick up a bomb and throw it through a window into a different sector. It helps if you have another droid there waiting to catch it for there is always the chance that the bomb will detonate prematurely. You will also find circuit boards laying around and the object with these is to return them to the computer room. These are essential as they open up extra windows and doors, activate teleports and remove force fields. Your aim is to find a room at the corner of the building with a window leading to the outside through which you can dispose of the bomb.

On top of all this there are the guards to contend with. They will destroy you on contact and the only way to neutralise them is by persuading them to follow you through a hole in the floor onto the next lower level. Do this often enough and the guards will blow up. Still your problems aren't over. Because of the nature of the research establishment, some of the rooms have decidedly funny properties. The main difference you will notice is that they are all colour-coded and this refers to the gravity level in the room. This ranges from 0.5G to 3G and affects your aim badly when you try to throw objects out of a room. At higher levels, rooms are rotated through 90 or 180 degrees, giving rise to another set of problems. Or a room may be blacked out totally.

Deactivators is an excellent mixture of strategy and action. It is not easy to work out the correct sequence of events that you must organise and a lot of people will find that they are getting nowhere fast with the game. Certainly it is very daunting at first and it would help considerably if you could get a decent demonstration before deciding if it is the game for you. Love it or hate it, it will definitely give your grey matter a good working over.