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When the place to be is not California or Japan but Deep Space, when the brightest and most ambitious are emigrating to the stars, Phoebus is the colonists' nightmare. To begin with everything went to plan, the Pericles made a perfect landing and soon set up an operations base. Initial reconnaissance uncovered a vast network of caves and tunnels.

Then one dark day an exploration party discovered the entrance to a new tunnel network - and were promptly wiped out. They had stumbled across the lair of Triax, a genetic engineer infamous for experiments turning helpless victims into ruthless killers. Sentenced to drift endlessly in space, unluckily he crashed on Phoebus. Once freed, he restarted his hideous experiments. Already he has made himself immune to the aging process, constructed an elaborate defence system arid formed an army of slave creatures. The crew of the Pericles have provided him with fresh material for experiments - themselves - and a spaceship to spread his evil throughout the universe.

The last transmission from the Pericles is a frantic plea for help, one you are among the first to hear. Famous hero that you are, you decide to investigate. The fact that you recently lost all your weapons (while escaping from the Acid Creatures of Ravinox Five) is a matter of little concern for such a hero, isn't it...?

The mission to recapture Triax, and rescue the captured crew, begins with your ship hovering above the Pericles. But no sooner than you don your spacesuit than Triax beams aboard, nicks your Destinator and beams off again - a neat little sequence which leaves you unable to move your ship!

You're not afraid though, and while your spacesuited figure may be tiny, it's brilliantly animated. Besides simply running left/right you can fly using a pixel-firing jetpack, and the way the body swings about is superb. Even your vapour trail is realistically animated, just watch the pixels bounce off water! As you explore you not only find water pools, but gun turrets firing homing missiles, birds, frogs, robots and many more creatures. There's also clams (which powerfully attract or repulse objects) and mushrooms (some briefly disable the jetpack by clogging the nozzles, others affect you making control difficult).

All these objects are rather small but generally well drawn. They need to be since there's no background graphics and the caves themselves are simply represented, but this also makes an absolutely vast game-map possible and I'm certainly not complaining.

As for our jetpacking hero, he not only looks neat, he's got lots of useful functions. He can pick up objects, put four of them in his pockets, use them and even drop or throw them! These functions can be accessed either by keys, or using an icon table displayed by pressing the spacebar. Then there's your ship's teleporter which can instantaneously beam you back to your ship, or to any of four positions previously 'remembered' by pressing R. It's best for these to be in a safe place, because when you get badly hurt the teleporter automatically beams you to one. This means you never die, although you can mess up your game so badly - by losing a vital object - that restarting is the only sensible option.

Such complexity ensures there's a lot more to Exile than simply mapping Phoebus's vast tunnel network and blasting the monsters. It's a game where the programmers have concentrated on gameplay rather than graphics. Interaction is foremost: take coronium crystals and rocks, which both cause usefully big explosions if brought together. Crystals can be created by burning mushrooms - however, unless you've taken a special pill coronium radiation is lethal! The pill can be found somewhere, but other objects require you to trade with alien creatures.

Exile won't appeal to the completely brain-dead shoot-'em-up league, but for anyone who wants to spend weeks and maybe even months exploring a sophisticated new world packed with hazards and fun, it's unmissable.

Exile may have basic backdrops but that doesn't really matter with such phenomenal attention to detail in the main character and co. Jetpack thrusts produce little pixels of jet exhaust, there's a Turrican 2-style wind effect, objects bob up and down when thrown in water, bullets bounce off walls - even the homing missiles are wonderful to watch!

Shades of Broderbund graphic quality with all these little characters running around and it's these that really make the game. There's also a nicely open-ended challenge though, and the player has total freedom to manipulate objects, explore and even get the enemies to help him out - now that's something you don't often see in computer games! With its high level of interaction, brain-addling puzzlers and simple jetpacking fun.

Exile has kept me hooked all month. By the way, anyone know what to do with the flask, it's driving me up the wall!

Design, programming & sound: Jeremy Smith & Peter Irvin
Graphics: Dokk

Presentation 73%
Nice title page, single load, two RAM saves, cassette/disk save/load function, informative instruction manual.

Graphics 80%
Unspectacular and rather tiny, but perfectly formed and nicely animated.

Sound 69%
A nice range of spot FX.

Hookability 89%
Instruction manual takes you step-by-step through early stages, ensuring even Stu couldn't get confused. Really addictive with jetpacking around being great fun.

Lastability 93%
625 screens, packed with some quite complex puzzles and even with infinite lives it's going to take some working out to solve. Bringing out the astronauts and defeating Triax is a good quest.

Overall 91%
Good enough to keep you exiled for ages!