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At Iwo Jima in World War Two there was only one kind of Japanese casualty - the dead. Of the 22,000 defending the island against American invasion only 216 finally surrendered. In this PPS game the player, taking the Americans, must land and wipe out all opposition.

Designer John Bethell has employed the same game mechanism as for his Falklands 82. It is a slow, plodding system, and works better at representing the grim advance of the US Marines across the island than the British manoeuvres in the Falklands.

But it hardly makes for a challenging or exciting game.

The key to winning is controlling indirect fire from aircraft and ships off shore. But to accomplish this the computer offers the player as a target, for each of his own units, every one of the twenty or so Japanese units on the island in turn. For a game lasting thirty turns set aside a whole afternoon - there is no save mechanism.

To compensate for this awkward playing mechanism the designer has had to ignore historical realism to speed the game up a little.

The American force is cut to about a third of its true size, the Japanese defence randomised, and an improbably Japanese submarine added to the game.

The result is not much like Iwo Jima, but the slow grind to destroy all enemy units gives a fair idea of what Marine tactics in the Pacific had to be.

Iwo Jima is released as part of the Strategic Wargames Series (an odd title, the game has little to do with strategy) the idea of which is to provide beginners with an easily played wargame at a low cost.

Fair enough, but there's no reason why beginners should be taught bad habits which they will only have to un-learn later.