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The latest French import puts you in the role of a "gendarme" investigating a suspicious death, which is first thought to be suicide but soon looks far more sinister. The game loads in two sections, the first one giving you a chance to examine the scene of the incident and the second to investigate using the police computer network.

The scene of the supposed suicide is a single, macabre but detailed and well drawn screen, dominated by the dead body of Mlle Vera Cruz. Scattered around on the floor and furniture are various objects and clues that have to be examined. You control a cursor on the screen that can be placed over the various objects, which can then be examined in greater detail to provide information that may be a clue or may be misleading.

You'll need to note down on paper all of the information you find because you can't look at it again once you leave this section of the program. Make sure you examine everything you can because even the smallest object may reveal something interesting. When you're finished, the second part of the program has to be loaded. This takes you to your office, where you can communicate with all the other police and judicial services through the Diamond Computer Network.

You have six main options while using the computer: send a message, print out a screen (if you've got a printer), see a statement from a witness, compare evidence, make an examination, and arrest the guilty party.

Messages can be sent to various branches of the local and national police, prisons and judicial information centres, in an attempt to gain useful information. Or messages can be used to find out further details on an individual who may be known to one of the other services. Or police elsewhere on the network may know some-thing of a particular piece of evidence.

The main problem with these communications is that you have to get only one pan of the message wrong and you always get the same message 'Addressee not applicable'. This means you don't know whether you made a typing mistake, used the wrong form of message or the service really had no information on the question.

Consequently you can be fishing about in the dark not knowing what's going on, purely because you can't communicate with the computer properly. The instructions are not exactly over-helpful on this matter either, a situation exacerbated by their translation from the original French.

The other options are much easier to use since they require less composition of messages. There are still hitches though: when performing an examination, for example, you are told you can make a 'graphological' examination, but you're not told exactly how to do that.

If you can penetrate these problems there is a very good game underneath with plenty of nice touches. There are the facial pictures of suspects, the need for deductive reasoning and of course the need for a policeman's perseverance. It's a shame that this is marred by the impenetrable replies of the computer to so many enquiries, 'addressee not applicable' and 'without interest'. A good game, but one that could do with being a lot more helpful and user-friendly.

I'm sure there's a good game in here, but poor translations and general unfriendliness moan it's just too difficult to get at. Even the most patient of detectives can only put up with 'addressee inapplicable' so many times before he hands in his badge.

Still playable, and still impenetrable.

P. A difficult case that takes some solving.
P. Nice touches like the suspects' faces.
P. Needs a lot of thought.

N. Very unhelpful responses to unproductive questions.
N. Translation is unhelpful in places.
N. Takes a lot of getting into.