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You find yourself at the headquarters of the STA on the planet Mongo, facing a man who greets you with the warmth of a Jovian winter. He gives you your assignment as head agent - capture "Wing", the notorious interplanetary criminal.

A spaceship is at your disposal and, after sorting out a few problems, you are all set for the galaxy trail, tracking down your quarry. The problems involve learning how to pilot your ship and how to get it fuelled up for the journey!

The game comes on a double-sided disc and has full sentence input which allows abbreviations and multiple commands. This means that, providing you know your galaxy (within the game!) you are able to travel around and land on different planets which can be explored or exploited to further your quest.

A novel feature is the provision of a "living tutorial" which is loaded in separately from the game. This contains full information, with an on-screen demonstration or what form your input should take and how to play the adventure.

There is a four-line text window below the graphics and, if a response doesn't fit, a "ping" announces that more will follow when you hit a key. The graphics lack the full use of colour, but are detailed and very fast to display. The response time when moving (when the graphics are redrawn) is a mere four seconds and, during this period, the graphics clear to a full text screen showing the most recent conversation.

I found this a very enjoyable adventure to play, giving the satisfaction of being able to get around a fair number of places without any unduly difficult early problems.

The Tracer Sanction is from Activision for Apple II, IBM PC and PCjr, and Commodore 64 on disc.