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Cut Titles: Fast-cutting, establishing shots of 19th century Munich. Ironside-style music. Words drift lazily down to centre of screen as title: Beethoven - Badge 417. Words become pellucid as title sequence unfolds behind. Throughout, red crosshair target slides purposefully across screen, trying to draw a bead on Beethoven's head.

Fast cuts: Beethoven skidding across bonnet of car, gun in hand; Beethoven in street, directing tourist with huge map; Beethoven pounding away on piano; Beethoven diving to catch dropped phial of deadly virus; Beethoven dancing furiously in stroke-lit nightclub; Beethoven conducting 80-piece orchestra, turning to wink at girl in front row; Beethoven jumping for the skids of rising helicopter but missing and falling off a building; Beethoven squatting down to sign the manuscript of Fidelio for a little girl; Beethoven pulling himself out of a swimming pool fully-clothed, grinning ruefully.

Crosshair settles over final pic and stylised bullet-holes splatter across the screen.

Caption: Lee Horsley is:
Caption: Beethoven - Badge 417.
Caption: Tonight's Episode - Murder's Not For Amateurs.

(Streets of 19th century Munich. Burgermeister strides past, followed by Beethoven.)

Burgermeister: Dammit, Beethoven, you know I can't do that.

Beethoven: C'mon, Bill. You haven't a chance of solving this without me.

Burgermeister: No, Beethoven. No. The last time you helped out, we had a convent blown up and sixteen casualties - including my wife.

Beethoven: Goddammit, Bill - he was my partner.

(Burgermeister stops suddenly.)

Burgermeister (stabbing with forefinger in emphasis): No way, Beethoven. We're all sorry about Spielz, but you're a loose cannon. You don't take orders. The department can't afford another media crucifixion. Beethoven, you're off the case.

Beethoven (freezingly): Sorry, Bill - but I don't hear you.

(He drives off in a fast car, tyres squealing.)

But anyway.

Fears is a maddening game. On the one hand it's a stunning technical achievement, combining fast, full-screen Doom clonage with stairways, lifts, rivers of acid, sinister lighting and near-subliminal sound to create a fantastically scary atmosphere; on the other it's hateful to a frightening degree. There was never a moment in the game where I was genuinely, freely enjoying myself, lost in it, believing in it, ducking when rocket shots roared over my head and bellowing a suitable movie quote as I won a tensely mismatched battle.

Not once. And that is clearly terribly, terribly wrong.

A heck of a lot of this wrongness is to do with the monsters and the way they 'handle'. You'll always be opening doors suddenly to receive fireballs in the face as, strangely, the monsters have unerringly luckily guessed when you're approaching. A few goes furnish the answer: if they're close enough not to be concealed by the dark fringes of the screen (a spectacularly beautiful effect, as the corridor before you fades into terrifying nothingness almost as if you're carrying a torch or something) the monsters know exactly where you are. You might not be able to see them - say, they're at the bottom of a flight of steps, or in the pit of a lift - but *they know where you are*. You'll never really be fighting just the one - even if that's the only one you can see - because others will be pouring fire into you as you writhe helplessly. And that's rubbish.

As is, indeed, the way the monsters rip bullets at you until dead. Slam rounds into the monsters in Gloom and they recoil wounded, their aim thrown and their senses scrambled for a few vital moments. In Fears, a monster will contiue to fire, speedily and accurarely, unconcerned by your retaliatory shots, up to their death. (Even, in fact, as their death animation plays, because until it's finished the game doesn't acknowledge them as dead. I'm not making this up.) And you can't plan to avoid them. A fatuous omission of such a sound-clever game is a 'wandering monster' noise, or a trumpet of joy as they spot you. (How hard could it have been to add even, say, a sound for the bullets missing you and flying by?) Thundering around the complex, the first you know of a monster is the thwup-thwup of its bullets making your screen go orange. You have no warning.

A third naughty thing is the way Fears cheats with height. There are indeed stairs and lifts, but the game sees everything as 'flat' - if you fire directly at a monster you'll hit it, regardless of your respective vertical positions (There is in fact a hierarchy to height; if there are monsters above and ahead, you'll automatically shoot at the lower ones first. Gee, thanks.) It's a common cheat in Doom games (Gloom leaves well alone by not bothering with stairs to start with!) and would be perfectly acceptable were it not for two things: the monsters *knowing where you are* (remember, being atop a tottering ledge or, indeed, behind a wall is no obstacle to their seeing you!) and the inescapable rivers of lava. By all means, have drains full of killer acideswirling ominously about the base of the towering maze for the unwary player to plunge into, but *give them a chance to escape*.

Fears, incredibly, has complicated, twisting tunnels of acid - sometimes containing extra ammo and tantalising bonuses - but absolutely no way of getting back to dry land. Fall down and, no matter how excitingly fast you run, you will die. What's the reason for not having put in a lift, or a button to make a drawbridge come down? The game alienates you as you struggle through a level, fall off a ledge (sometimes through no fault of your own of which more later) and lose everything. And that's abominable. Especially as you realise you can't 'see' down a steep flight of steps. Yes folks, at points in the game you're walking blind, painfully aware that a movement too far at the bend in the stairway will drop you straight in the lava. (And there's no 'give' at all in corners: while you might reasonably expect to get away with cutting slightly across the diagonal, Fears gives no quarter: down you go.) There's even, God forgive them, a bit where you see a staircase to a button that is, in fact, concealing a gap.

What the hell is going on?

This is what I think is going on: the playtesters are too close to the game. They are, I'll hazard, the programmers. It doesn't matter to them that the monsters' bullets are so fast you have little to no chance to avoid them by sidestepping. Nor do they think much of the extensive ledge-based action which utterly negates the sidestep: use it, and you fall off. Nor, indeed, of the boggling width of your 'body' (it appeared that every shot to hit the screen counted as hitting me, with no accounting for the bullets actually having whizzed safely past on one side). They've been playing Fears for ages, you see, and they're used to it.

Well, chums, I played Fears for ages, and at no point did I become used to it. At all times I was horribly aware it was a computer game, and that I couldn't, for example, rush thrillingly through the level because I'd just fall off something and die, or get caught in a six-way crossfire and die, or step upon what I took to be another stair and fall through and die.

Minor faults, like the non-real-time map (you should always, always in this kind of game be able to run around using the map because the levels are so fiendishly complicated - and Fears' are phenomenally fiendish) blew up to catastrophic proportions. A promise to myself not to use the cheat mode until I'd completely, utterly played it out fairly collapsed around level five (there are thirty!) and I pottered among the rest of the game finding out it was dismaying similar throughout: rooms with lots of door, monsters immediately behind the doors, ledges to other rooms and lots of falling. Oh, and what's the point of having as a fun-packed hidden weapon a circular saw if every monster acts in exactly the same way and shoots you from a distance?

Let's stop and do some good stuff.

There's a tremendous level editor in Fears that's dead easy to use (everything's based on coloured squares) and fun to play around with. This is decidedly a Good Thing, and beefs up the longevity of the game. A pity you can't alter the way the monsters 'think', but there you go. There's a (serial link only) 'deathmatch' game in there, but even though it's a huge step beyond Gloom's - different weapons instead of balls of light - there's still no feeling of terror at stumbling across your better-armed opponent, because whatever he's carrying, he looks the same. Also, there's no feeling you're blasting someone: no blobs of blood splashing off them, or ricochets or anything - a fault, indeed, of the game proper. There is, in short, no visceral (erk) 'vavoom!' to the game. (So much, then, for a selection of Good Things.)

Fears is enormously more clever than Gloom, but I undoubtedly prefer the latter game, for is it fun. Fears, to my mind, fails on all levels but the aesthetic: it's hopelessly unfair as a zap game (you never look forward to a fight) and ludicrously uphill as an exploration game (if you don't fall to your death you'll be baffled by the alikeness of the walls and fiddly map and go in circles for ages). I grew from smirking fraternally at its faults to hating having to load it and play. By all means slather over this proper Doom - but on the Amiga, ignore me completely and add 50 or 60 percent to the score, but you will, of course, be wrong.

Uppers: It's technically one of the funkiest games on the Amiga. You can save after every level. Secret rooms. Treasure. Time trials. Varied, nasty weapons. Deathmatch. Difficulty levels (although they affect only the amount of energy a monster hit takes off). Phenomenal sound. (Not that you'd notice - it's all horribly spooky background atmosphere moaning. Teasingly pervasive.) Lifts. Clever lighting. All the right stuff. And a level editor.

Downers: But it's horrible, horrible to play. The monsters aren't fair, and you can't recover from a fall, and sometimes you can't even see where you're going. You end up edging around, prodding the ground ahead with a tentative toe, when you should be zooming about in high-speed drive-by battles. The programmers' idea of making the game tricky is to have six hidden monsters open up on you in a crossfire, and damn you if you're found wanting.

Reaches for the stars, but explodes in vacuum.