Firstly, I'd like to congratulate the author C. Bury on following my recommendations in AA60 on sending software into magazines for review. It's so much easier if people bother to get their games play-tested, as well as sending all the instructions plus a hint sheet. Unfortunately, I'm now going to have to admit that I wasn't too impressed with Talisman Of Power.

Your quest (should you decide to accept it), is to travel to the temple of Ezekiel and destroy the evil lord Orsova. Included in the instructions you get a list of verbs the game accepts (always useful for playing adventures!) but not much else!

The game was written using GAC and is reasonably large (60 locations) with average graphics. Most of the puzzles are well thought out, although a couple seemed a bit difficult as there is no clue at all about what you must do. For example, you discover two dwarf-like creatures sitting by a pond, talking. Fine, you think, so you try to talk to them but they just turn around and tell you to shut up! What you must do is give them a fishing line - but there is no clue or reason for doing this!

Another puzzle involves a statue: on examining the statue you are told it is of Orsova but you are given no other clues. What you must do is smash the statue up with a hammer to discover a pick-axe hidden inside. As you don't get many pick-axes hidden in statues, this puzzle is a bit illogical! What would have been better would have been if you were told that the statue had a pick-axe in its hand or if the 'help' command had told you to try breaking the statue open...

The parser is unfriendly at times as well. Twice in the game you are required to dig, but the command 'dig' gives the response: 'You can't'! What you must do is type 'dig in earth' - not very impressive! I also had big problems trying to cross a lake in a boat to get to an island. After spending five minutes trying to discover how to get into the boat, I realised that you could just 'row boat' without getting in it! However, the only way you could get to the island was 'row boat to island' - yuk!

To be fair, there's nothing really wrong with the game, it just seems to lack a certain quality that would make it good. The best word to sum up Talisman Of Power is average.

This is C. Bury's first game though and hopefully he will improve in time.