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Great! I thought, an all-graphics adventure for a change - this should be good and I loaded 16K Time Warp into Basic on my Atari. As the game starts, you find yourself on the first level of a vast kingdom, from which you roam about, picking up objects such as food, bullets and treasure.

If you can collect enough, you are able to buy the key to the next level. On average this takes about 25 minutes a level, but just how many levels there are is a secret not yielded by the instructions.

Of course, you don't get it all your own way. The spider servants of the evil time lord are out to kill or rob you if they can. They look like round blobs with sticks poking out and are the fastest thing in the game.

The graphics used to display the landscape are all character graphics, which are not the best I've seen. As the player moves near the edge of the screen, instead of scrolling, the whole screen is redrawn which seems to take longer and longer each time.

In fact, the whole mode of play is very slow and it seems to take forever to get from one side of the screen and back again. Overall, the game is best compared with the type of game where the player runs around a maze shooting robots before going to the next level - but five times slower.

A game which looked reasonable at the start, but turned out to be a great disappointment, Time Warp is from English Software for the 16K Atari and costs £9.95.