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An interesting program which combines strategy and adventure by the use of multiple choice input. The game is based on the James Herbert novel and it does help if you have read this book; however, it is not essential and the game can be enjoyed on its own merits.

Your prime task is to deploy your forces around London to contain and defeat the rats; this is done by moving a cursor around a map of the city and viewing appropriate sections. Once a section has been chosen, information on the number of men and their equipment is displayed. You can then modify this.

Every now and then the game changes into adventure mode where one of your characters, either one of the main four or one of the many supporting characters, is faced with a meeting with the revolting rodents. In this mode the text input is built up word by word from a bank of options.

Graphics are used to good effect, when you make a fatal mistake the rat leaps through the text. The whole thing is quite an unusual concept and I enjoyed it greatly, however, the vivid descriptions are quite gory and not for the squeamish. It will take quite a bit of playing to master this game, especially as the secondary characters load in a random fashion making plenty of gameplay variation.

This latter feature is not clearly explained and caused a couple of aborted loadings as I thought the program had crashed. If a block is not loading then leave it, it is probably simply not required for that variation of the game.