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At the beginning of Terrorist, you are shown a map of the town which you must protect. You have a few seconds to memorise the map and then you must retrace the roads and rivers on a blank screen. You lose points if you make a mistake.

From time to time, there will be an attack on a building in the town, like the theatre or church. You must get in a helicopter and fly to its defence. When you arrive, you will be shown the building which is under attack.

Silhouettes of terrorists flit from place to place and you have to line up your gunsight to shoot them. You must finish them off quick, or you will lose some of your men.

The object of the game is to either shoot all the terrorists or complete your map before you run out of points, fuel or men.

The graphics are very simple: the map consists of only a few lines, the buildings are very basic line drawings, and the terrorists are definitely not mini masterpieces.

The time given for you to memorise the map is quite inadequate. You are unlikely to be given the same map twice since there are 8,000 of them, and it is most unlikely that you will want to play Terrorist that much.

The terrorists flash on the screen in random places. You must line up your gunsight and shoot to kill. Since the gunsight moves extremely fast, it only needs a tap on the joystick to send it halfway across the screen. This makes it almost impossible to fire accurately in the time allowed! In the end I found that I could kill more terrorists by randomly waggling the joystick with my finger constantly on the fire button.

If you buy Terrorist, you'll probably throw your computer out the window with frustration!

This is one of those games that is curiously unappealing for a reason that cannot easily be explained. The graphics are simple, perhaps too simple. The shoot-out scenes are all too similar, with little detail. Sound is limited.

Virgin have tried but, yet again, not quite made the grade I quickly tired of it.

If you're a hardened megazapper, forget this game. It is far too complicated to get started and after two minutes I felt like throwing my joystick through the TV.

Most of the sounds are sirens and persistent bleepers which are supposed to simulate a state of emergency but all they did was get on my nerves. If you do not shoot the terrorists within a certain time, strangely enough, they blow up.

Virgin are capable of producing good games so why do they taint their reputation with software of this low quality. The only thing which terrorised me about this game was the price.

One of my main gripes about Terrorist was that, at first, the game is incredibly confusing, seeming to be perfectly happy to be left to its own devices - or was it just me?

Steven Filby