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The waves are pounding your dinghy, the sea spray lashes your face, the cold is numbing but you've got a job to do. An enemy super-sub has been sighted off the coast and it must be either captured or destroyed. The mission is highly sensitive, so you go in alone with no prospect of rescue if caught. Are you ready? You were born ready (as they say in the movies).

The first real problem is finding the sub. Now as always in the world of cloak and dagger, life is never straightforward, and you have to negotiate a route strewn with mines - so many in fact it makes the straits of Hormuz look like a secure sea lane. At a conservative estimate, there's at least one mine every five meters, which is a lot of explosive for a little water.

Undaunted, you rev up the dinghy and speed off into the night. To get past the mines you need to get your rubber raft to bounce off a wave into the air. Simple, apart from the fact that the next, boat busting bomb is just over a dinghy length behind it. You have to encourage your raft to skip between them, sometimes wrenching your joystick forwards and backwards to leap grouped mines or fit into a very tight gap.

Failure to achieve this nigh on impossible task results in an explosion which pitches your diver into the drink - probably the safest place to be. As if by magic though, you are whisked back to the beginning (very distressing) to try with another of your eight lives. If this diver was so good why can't he swim all the way and cut out this thankless task altogether?

The action is immensely intensive, highly reminiscent of the opening bridge section of Army Moves (AA 22 58%), and every bit as infuriating.

The style of the whole event though is great fun. Your old sea dog gets blown out of his boat with truly balletic grace into the brilliantly drawn briny blue. He even manages a back flip before disappearing into the ocean with a splash. You may not succeed immediately but who cares you're so busy locking good.

After a similar set of trials and tribulations to his land-locked army chum, the marine hero eventually reaches the safety (!) of the the enemy sub. Here things ease up a bit on the fatality front. Your jolly jacktar is tooled up with a machine gun/flame thrower and is hunting for the four officers who control the the submersible. Around he runs using lifts and doors to move about the ship, always on the look out enemy soldiers who must be avoided or shot on sight.

He runs, crouches to shoot and lies on the floor to duck shots and hide (these guards have really bad eyesight, they just walk right over the top of him). In gun battles your victims are hurled cinema style backwards with the impact of bullets, or fall to the floor crispy at the edges if toasted with the flamethrower. When dead, they have the decency to hang around for a couple of seconds to allow a brief bit of looting for ammunition, first aid or, if it's an officer, code numbers. These are your primary objective as they allow you operate the subs computer controls. Of course if you torched your opponent then there ain't much left to search. Bullets don't keep well at gas mark 9.

The running around is astoundingly more survivable than the dinghy in Part One. The sub is complex enough for you to spend many happy hours just blasting anyone unlucky enough to come your way and rummaging through his pockets for more supplies. The computer section means that once you've collected the codes and fed them in with the correct commands e.g. Stop engines, the sub surfaces and then... well, that would be telling.

Dinamic have turned up another graphically sound game that is just too difficult to play. Games should have their more difficult sections later and not sooner, if the player, regardless of experience, is to enjoy it to the full - if only to give you an idea of what's going on. No doubt those who eventually whipped Game Over I, II and Army Moves will relish the prospect of another such challenge. The rest of us who actually like to see more than 10 seconds of action before dying, will have to wait for the passwords to avoid section one.

It's not quite as evil as Army Moves, but it's a close run thing. A tough game with great graphics, especially in Part Two.

3,000 points.

Visibility: Zero (Part One) Visibility: Good (Part Two)

Graphics 84%
P. Dynamic action.
P. Realistic battling on a giant sub.

Sonics 64%
P. Great spot effects create atmosphere.
P. Good tune, if rather short.

Grab Factor 32%
N. Far too difficult in the opening stage.
N. Impossible opener on a green screen.

Staying Power 71%
P. Part Two adds a whole new depth to the gaming.
N. That's if you can ever get to Part Two.

Overall 67%
P. Dinamic strike again with a great game...
N. ...spoilt by overly difficult gameplay.