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Suddenly a pair of red eyes appear on the screen. You shine your torch in the general direction of them and are in time to see a large black animal scuttle away (no prizes for guessing what sort of animal!). Your pulse quickens noticeably and more eyes appear. You come face-to-face with one of the evil creatures. You scream horribly. The terror has begun.

If I tell you that this is only the loading sequence in ths new title from Hodder & Stoughton, it won't take you long to realise that horror is the name of the game.

Based on James Herbert's bestselling novel of the same name, Rats is a strategy/adventure game, the object of which is to prevent the balance of power between man and rat shifting in favour of the rodent.

The main screen depicts a map of London where sightings of the rats are indicated. These sightings may or may not be accurate as panic sets in to the population. You have the option of deploying your emergency forces in order to try and contain the threat. These forces consist of Ratkill - a company specialising in pest control - the police, the fire brigade and, in later stages of the game, the army. Selection is icon-drive via either keyboard or joystick. Having selected your forces, you can then equip them - different weapons are used by different forces. For example, only Ratkill can use chemical gas whilst poice and the army can use rifles.

Your initial strategy is very much one of containment as you struggle to discover more about this superbreed of rat. To this end, you have a research and development section (R&D) where you can engage your scientists on four different projects: the origin of the rats, their biology, a defence system to protect humans and an offence system to destroy the rats.

Throughout the game you can get reports of combat situations or details of how R&D are doing together with details of any new technology available to you.

At periodic intervals, a screaming sound is heard and the game cuts to an adventure sequence. Here, you play one of several characters in the game in a face-to-face struggle with the rats. Input of command is again icon-driven. At the bottom of the screen you can select from Command, Redescribe and Inventory. The last two are self explanatory whilst the irst gives you a list of actions available to you such as TAKE, DROP, GO, OPEN, CLOSE. Choosing one of these gives you your next option and so on.

The special effects at this stage of the game are excellent. You can hear your heartbeat getting faster and faster, pictures of rats appear all over the text you are trying to read and your palms to get really sticky as you try to enter a command such as "Put the rat in the cage" for all the adventure section takes place in real time. Should your character die, his contorted face flashes before you on the screen.

The game is lost in one of three ways; the rats breaking out of London, losing all your emergency forces or if one of your three main characters dies. It doesn't matter too much if your minor characters die but if they survive, better information can be given to R&D which speeds up their research. A useful hint here is that it helps considerably if you can capture a live rat.

All this sounds fine and very exciting and it is - the first time that you play it. The major drawback is that as soon as you lose, you have to reload the game. As it will take you many goes to get the adventure sequences correct, this will prove annoying in the extreme. I feel that this is the sort of game that looks great the first time you see it - the scary atmosphere is really very good! - but that it will soon lose its appeal.