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Time Travel, the Dark Ones and runes are all part of this new arcade adventure.

Good has lost the battle with Evil. As if the Bomb going off wasn't enough, your troubles are far from over.

Somehow you managed to survive the holocaust in your own cellar, along with six candles, two tins of beans and a boffin called Uriah Winterbottom MSc who is now, unfortunately, slumped dead in the ony armchair left in Clapham.

Before he shuffled off this mortal coil, he had been babbling about how he had nearly beaten the Dark Ones who were not pouring through time portals to disrupt earth history.

Your job is simple. Travel through time battling against the dark ones' minions until you find and collect eight objects that belonged to the eight great Minds of Creation. This will stop them probing through time to look for them and allow you to collect enough runes to cast the spell that will seal up the portals and repair the fabric of time. All on two tins of beans!

Timetrax is a joystick-controlled adventure played on 21 screens of action spread throughout seven time zones. You begin the game is your three-floored, fully furnished bunker. Unfortunately, everything useful is hidden away including your trusty gun.

Since this is one of the few objects that begin the game in the same room, you soon track it down, but just as you find it behind the cooker and start looking for some bullets, two strange characters appear with jetpacks on their backs!

You dive through a door but there's more of them in here.

A strange flickering portal suddenly appears in front of you. You dive through and find yourself in a frozen wasteland.

The portal disappears leaving you trapped in the Ice Age, 10,000 BC.

This is the pattern of how most of your attempts will begin as you hop through time trying to find something to help while keeping an eye out for any of the Dark One's minions. These must be avoided at all costs as they quickly drain your strength and finally kill you.

Soon you'll begin to find a few of the game's objects that will dramatically increase your chances of survival. Such as the gun and bullets that will allow you to shoot the jetmen, potions to heal you and perhaps even one of the objects belonging to the great minds.

However, even at this stage you have ony begun to scratch the surface of this massive game.

Learning how the time portals work is the key to playing the game as once you've finally mapped the ten minute sequence you can not only predict where and when a portal will appear but also where it leads to.

Your bunker and the Ice Age are just two of the seven time zones with each posing different problems and hazards.

In the Ice Age, the jetmen are replaced by giant flying insects and the furniture by holes in the ice. The doors are now caverns in the ice and the steps are cut out of the frozen landscape. Unfortunately you will also have to deal with slippery slopes and sharp stalagmites.

In the dawn of man (50,000 BC) strange plants and huts are scattered throughout the forest. Here the hazards are winged serpents and swamps.

Finally, you will also do battle with ghosts and spectres in a gothic house, dragonettes in an Egyptian setting, gargoyles in the dark ages and giant flies in the post-holocaust wilderness.

The game is played on a split-screen display with the top half showing three levels of the current time zone. In this screen our hero can climb between floors, search objects and move through doors and portals to other screens.

The lower half of the screen contains a command menu duckshoot through which you can look for, take, drop, swap and use objects that you find. Below this is a heart-shaped energy gauge, a clock (essential to plot the time portals) and storage windows for up to four objects and ten rune tiles.

The objects that you may find include weapons such as a gun or crossbow, ammunition (10 shots' worth of bullets or bolts), potions to replenish your energy, scrolls and rune tiles.

There are fifteen rune tiles altogether that combine in pairs to form ten spells. To help you further, the scrolls each contain one combination so you should be able to add magic to your skills. These spells allow you to move from one timezone to another (without a portal), see the contents of a lost chest, heal yourself, banish any nasties on the screen and reload a weapon.

Finally, you may also find the eight character items that belong to the eight Great Minds. These include a dagger, helmet, skull, map and book,

Giving the right object to the right character not only gets you nearer victory, it may help you further by gaining you a useful object in a swap. You can try swapping another object, but the likes of Bella the Witch, Stoneeye the Necromancer and Blackflay the Ghoul probably know the value of objects better than you do.

It takes a little white to get used to the game's commands menus but soon you'll be ready to take on the Dark Ones. But, before you stand any chance of success, you'll have to master two things, time travel and searching.

The time portals must be mapped and used at the right time, taking into account that the weapons only work in some of the timezones. For example, the gun doesn't work in the Ice Age. So you should leave any non-essential items until you return to that zone leaving your valuable object containers free for any objects you might find.

When you appear on a new screen, you should quickly sketch it (freeze the game if necessary) so that you can work out some search patterns that allow you to LOOK along a line of objects, and always be near an exit as trouble arrives.

Perfecting this will not only find you more objects (you won't waste time looking somewhere twice!) it will keep you a lot healthier.

Then, with a bit of luck, you'll find enough runes to try out some spells and potions to keep your quest going a little longer.

The Great Minds seem to like the runes a lot so when you find a spell combination that you could do without, such as Banish, you could trade those runes for the object the character has.

Timetrax is a fascinating mix of time travel, exploration and magic that forms a challenging game.

Although the controls are a little difficult to get used to (and are still difficult in a panic situation) they are effective and allow you to concentrate on the problems facing you. These begin with just staying alive, but later you will have to tackle rune combinations and trades with the game's characters while keeping one step ahead of the Dark Ones.

Then finally, using your Mastermind skills, you must not only find the correct four runes that will create the spell that will restore the fabric of time, you have to get them in the right order!

Your performance is judged at the end of the game and you are given a rating depending on how many monsters you have destroyed, spells you have cast, items you have returned and finally how much of the cosmic code you've discovered. The ratings range from pudding and jester, through adventure and warrior, to the ultimate accolades, superhero and demigod.

The game's graphics are impressive and feature an incredible amount of detail which adds to the enjoyment of the game which is completed by the atmospheric music that accompanies your valiant efforts.

My only criticism is the lack of a save game facility that could save you a *lot* of time and frustration should you be mugged by the Dark Ones just as you're completing the cosmic pattern.

Timetrax is available for the C64 from APS and costs £9.95.