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There are heroes and there are heroes. But Major Jan van Heuson and Lieutenant Esther Stern are in a league by themselves. Intelligent, fearless and tough, they are the backbone of Strike Force Cobra.

All right, it's time to declare an interest. The digitised picture of Major van Heuson at the beginning of the game is me. And Esther Stern is none other than C&VG's editorial assistant Lesley Walker.

The other pictures of the Strike Force Cobra team belong to various hacks and hackettes of the computer press. But we don't really want to talk about them, do we?

Strike Force Cobra is from Piranha, recently responsible for some fairly decent games, Colour Of Magic and the graphically wonderful Trap Door. Unfortunately, it's not as good.

The plot is hardly new and exciting. The world is under threat of nuclear blackmail by an evil genius known simply as The Enemy. He has developed a computer hacking system which has enabled him to take control of all the world's defence systems.

To build the system The Enemy has kidnapped top computer experts and imprisoned them at his fortress. Each has a code which must be collected before access can be gained to the main computer room.

Rather than give into this fiendish plan, Supreme Allied Command has put together a crack unit to smash The Enemy's plan.

That's where Major van Heuson and Esther Stern come in. You must select the Strike Force Cobra team from eight candidates. Each has special skills. Van Heuson, for instance, is an expert with explosives and Esther is a specialist in close quarters combat.

The four members of SFC, armed with sub-marchine guns and grenades, find themselves in the The Enemy's fortress. Killer robots, guards, automatic weapons systems and booby traps litter the place.

You can switch from controlling one member of team to another as you attempt to crack codes, explore the fortress and defeat the enemy.

The animated figures are very mobile and agile. They can jump, dive, crouch, stand up, kick, etc. It's good fun to get them to dive through windows, machine gun blazing.

The fortress is a 3D maze, quite fun to explore, but graphically quite crude.

On my copy of the game I found I could not revert to the menu to change my team of toughies without re-loading the game. Not a major gripe, but it did become a little annoying.