Love is an adventure game set around a house with many rooms and relies on the player entering commands which are then acted upon. At this point, any similarities with other ZX adventures stop... for this game is just for women!

The cassette comes with a detailed inlay card and leaflet explaining the story of the adventure and the basic instructions that you need to play it. Loading was perfect and the program auto-runs.

The main difference between Love and other adventures is that Love uses emotional responses as commands instead of the usual GO WEST or TAKE TREASURE which are found in many adventures. These responses are classified into six groupings; communicative, such as talk; intimate, such as kiss; distressed, such as cry; happy, such as laugh; thoughtful, such as think; and cold and annoyed, such as scorn.

As well as the many emotional responses, there are a few system commands. These extra commands are very handy indeed and include SLEEP which gets you out of any situation and back to your bedroom where you fall asleep and lose a day. FAST and SLOW are other system commands which alter the game speed and affect the screen presentation as they do in normal ZX81 programs. QUIT allows you to end the game with the very useful option of SAVEing the position that you are in onto tape for a later date. This to me is a feature that all adventure programs should have as there is nothing more annoying than having to switch off and lose a good position in an adventure only to start at the beginning again at some other time.

The game is set round the infamous Poke Hall at the time of a large house party. Your aim is to fall in love as quickly as possible in the time you are there. Your only possessions in the early stages are a pair of pyjamas and a handbag. The odd assortment of guests include the Indian Mystic, Mr. Ram Pac (What a pun!) and your old friend Tom who you have secretly admired and loved for many years. You start the game in your own bedroom in Poke Hall on day one and must progress by use of the various commands, some of which you are told about and some you have to discover.

I played the game several times but my male chauvinist instincts must have impaired my chances as I got nowhere after several hour's play. I invited several girls to play the game, but they faired no better and we all agreed on our conclusions that the game could get a little tedious. It does have some good things going for it such as its speed, which due to the small amount of machine code within the program is fast, and a vocabulary of over 200 words. Generally, this program is difficult to play and the responses to your commands and actions do not help you at all. I found the reply, "I have no action for... (whatever I had just entered)", coming up nine times out of ten and your available options seem very few indeed. I tried everything imaginable and, as a final protest, typed in UNDRESS which worked and left me naked!

On listing the program I found the number of locations and situations that you can find yourself in is a much larger figure than you would expect considering the limits of 16K memory. More importantly, there is a clever plot underlying the whole adventure, and it is a pity that this cannot be better explained to the player before the game is started.

The program can be considered a 'clean' one for the family, and at £5.00 is a standard adventure at a standard price.