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Beyond's new Adventure game for the Commodore 64 can best be described as different. Since they have a history of producing not-so-adventure-type Adventure games including The Lords Of Midnight and Doomdark's Revenge, you'd expect Shadowfire to be a bit special.

Although it's not an arcade game, everything's against the clock. You know, just 100 minutes to save the universe! Ah, you're thinking, but what about those of us who can't type very quickly. Fear not, Beyond have solved this problem by using icons - oft talked about in Apple Macintosh circles.

These are just little pictures which appear on the screen to represent various items, such as a character, a weapon, movement, and so on. Consequently, it's possible to play the entire game with a single joystick.

So if you wanted one of the characters to pick up the laser rifle, you just move the cursor over the character you want and press fire. This takes you to the character's personal screen, showing strength, stamina and such like. Now move the cursor to the yellow monitor icon and press fire again to get the weapons screen. You can then move the cursor to the pick-up icon, followed by the laser rifle icon to get the weapon. Easy, isn't it?

Now to the game itself. The bad guy, General Zoff, and his cronies have stolen the plans to a revolutionary new spaceship Shadowfire which you must retrieve.

At your disposal are six characters making up the Enigma team: Zark Montor, Syyik, Sevrina Maris, Torik, Maul and Manto.

The mission of this rather odd assortment, who look as though they have walked straight out of a comic book, is to recapture the plans.

To do this, you teleport the team to various parts of Zoff's sky fortress, where you dash about, battling with the baddies and collecting objects for later use. Having six characters to manipulate independently, there's always something to do.

The game itself is thoroughly enjoyable with excellent sound and graphics and is no doubt the forerunner of many more of its ilk. Though the die-hard text adventurers will probably ridicule it, the game is well worth trying. I can't wait for the further adventures of the E-team - promised by Beyond.