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Take your commando quartet on a gritty excursion to save the planet from nuclear devastation

If this were a film instead of a computer game, it'd be one of those cheapo British adventure films like The Wild Geese (or Penguins, or something like that), in which a group of British character actors and a few minor international stars get together to form an elite fighting squad and carry out a desperate mission, against insuperable odds in some oddly named third world nation.

In this case the fighting force is known as Strike Force Cobra, and the mission involves penetrating the fortress headquarters of a man nown only as The Enemy. Obviously gifted with a flair for the melodramatic, The Enemy is threatening the world with nuclear blackmail and only the Cobra team can stop him. By locating the captured scientists who have the codes to the central computer room, the team can then get to the computer and destroy both it and The Enemy's plans.

Like a cheapo adventure film, the game begins with a sequence where the team members are recruited. You have a choice of eight possible characters, out of which you have to assemble a team of four. I chose Kawalski, McWatt, Dawson and Stern, who in the film would be played by Ernest Borgnine (gruff marine with a heart of gold), Richard Burton (the leader - cool, unflappable, with some tragic secret in his past), Richard Harris (total alcoholic, but the best explosives man around), and some European sex kitten or other (French resistance - beautiful but hard as nails).

The four team members split up and enter the fortress at different points, gradually regrouping as they round up the captives and fight their way down through the fortress's four levels. You control one character at a time and have to co-ordinate their movements. There are a number of lifts and doorways which are controlled from points elsewhere in the complex, so you'll have to do a bit of mapping and work out how best to move the team so that they can help each other get past these obstacles.

The rooms and corridors of the fortress are heavily defended by electronic traps, automatic rifles, armed soldiers and various other devices of the sort which pad out the middle half hour of adventure films. There's a lot of leaping through windows, kicking down doors, hurling grenades and spraying everything in sight with machine gun fire. All this is well presented graphically and the animation is very good - a bit like a 3D version of Impossible Mission - although it does tend to slow down dramatically if there's a lot of movement on-screen.

The instructions could be a little clearer on some points, such as how to activate the lift and door switches, but if you stick with it, you should soon see what you're trying to do. The game is a combination of arcade action (in the combat side of thing) and strategy (in avoiding the traps and working your way through the fortress), and although these two parts of the game are well balanced, and the game is well presented, the pace of the game lets it down a bit. Even though you are working against a time limit there's not that much sense of urgency about the gameplay (what we need is a few close-ups of Richard Burton glancing at his watch and saying "Kawalski's late, damn him!").

Even so, Strike Force Cobra is still worth having a look at. It does have its moments, even if it doesn't quite achieve its full potential, and along wth The Trap Door is helping the new Piranha label to get off to a good start.