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When I first heard of this game I thought to myself, 'What's the point of fighting with flowers? A bunch of fives yes, but a bunch of blooms?' I know people say things with them, but not necessarily in a violent way. Anyhow, once I'd shoved a cotton bud down my lughole and listened once again to Palace's Pete Stone (was I stone deaf?), I realised this new Cinematique creation was not, in fact, called Fuchsia Wars. Silly me.

Monsieur Paul Cuisset has been quietly working on this 'new type of computer game' for the past three years, a type that incorporates adventure-style within an animated game. A Cinematique game. for short.

Earth is really in the soup. She's under attack from the Crughons, a race of time-travelling aliens who want to conquer earth (goodness knows why). They plan to do this by sabotaging her mega SDI-type defences before they're built. The Crughons travel back in time and even as you read this are planting delayed-action bombs in important little places (we're talking cotton buds again!).

You're the reluctant hero whose task it is to save the world. Your day begins half way up a skyscaper as you aim to clean those windows like they've never been cleaned before - a bit of a pain but it's clear you shine in this vocation, a glass above the rest really. Suddenly the boss appears from a window above and has a good ol' whinge at you about nothing in particular (why else do bosses exist?).

However, when he eventually runs out of breath and disappears back into the building you notice he's left the window open. You could go in! And after playing around outside on the scaffolding, and doing everything you can legally do with a bucket, you realise you have logo through the window to get further into the game.

Once inside, the nicely-drawn full-screen graphics of the building shrinks down to display interior offices. This location is a good one in which to practise manipulating your character and objects. I don't think I'll be giving too much away by telling you there's a key under the carpet. Finding it is easy enough but picking it up is not. Pixel perfection raises its ugly head on more than one occasion during play, and your character has to be in exactly the right spot to perform certain operations (such as picking up the aforementioned key). But accepting this idiosyncrasy is not difficult.

I must also mention the flag in the toilet (well who wouldn't?) 'cause it can cause problems. Get your man to open the toilet door and stand back while you lean as close to the screen as your eyes allow and scan the floor. Are you seeing tiny red spots before your eyes? Did the artist (Eric Chahi) see red for a moment and accidentally stick a odd pixel with the white ones of the floor? Has your little brother stuck his jammy fingers on the screen while you weren't looking? No! That minute, seemingly insignificant, red dot is in fact a very important map flag. It's also a primary lesson for the rest of the game: look carefully at every screen, move your cursor on to anything that looks interesting, odd or different and examine it. If you don't do this you'll miss something noteworthy and get nowhere fast. Fortunately, having to do this is by no means a chore as each location is very well drawn and there's usually plenty going on to entertain you while you search the screen.

Arcade sequences lurk within the game and leap out to test your mouse-clicking adroitness when you least expect it. One in particular, that occurs early on in the quest, pushed my button-pushing, mouse-manoeuvring prowess to its limit - which actually isn't very far, but then we can't have everything. If you've got an adept arcade player in the family I suggest you bribe them to help you get through this and other similar sequences or, if you're as naff at action games as I am, you may well have to bear the embarrassment of keyboard indents in your forehead.

Even though Future Wars is translated from the Francais there are only one or two minor text errors (the odd letter missed out for example). However, some of the puzzles and their solutions are more worrying; a pair of automatic doors won't open for you because the attached videocamera has a dirty lens and it can't detect your presence, so what do you have to do? 'Use lance with videocamera' (of course). This obscure command allows you to clean the lens so the doors may open. Also the 'Operate' command encompasses almost everything that 'Take' or 'Examine' doesn't. For example, 'Operate tree' shakes it, 'Operate rubble' sweeps it to one side to reveal... something, and so on. These niggly bits are incredibly minor compared to the amount of wonderful stuff in Future Wars, but if I gave the game nothing but praise. Pete Stone would be even more impossible to live with (not that we are cohabiting you understand... it's just a figure of speech, honest).

Cinematique is an excellent system. The proof is in Future Wars which is a joy to play: graphics and sound are brilliant, gameplay is compulsive (if a mite easy - even Mr. Wynne got a little way into it), and it incorporates a good, quick save/load facility and a useful pause for taking a well-earned rest during the action bits. Its mechanics are similar to Lucasfilm and Sierra On-Line games such as Indiana Jones, Zak McKracken and Gold Rush but on the whole it looks and sounds much more polished.

Future Wars may be a bit linear but the next release is claimed to be less so: personally I can't wait to get my grubbies on it. Meanwhile, be prepared to have a really good time defeating the Crughons.