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Transylvanian Tower is the latest of Richard Shepherd's adventure games for the 48K Spectrum. Count Dracula's lair contains no less than 500 rooms, and your task is to find your way through them, kill the Count, and steal from his secret treasure trove.

The tower is on five levels, each of which is made up of a ten by ten maze. You start in the top left corner, and you have to reach the room at the bottom right which contains the 'transporter' (what's wrong with stairs?!) to take you to the next level. As you enter each room, you are given a three-dimensional view of the walls and any doors leading off. You may also come across a useful object such as a ring that lets you walk through walls or a sword for killing bats with. Movement is done using the cursor keys, '5' and '8' for left and right, '7' to go forward, and '6' turns you 90 degrees anticlockwise (so pressing it twice turns you right round without leaving the room).

Once you are past the opening titles of the program, complete with sneak preview of the Count, you have to wait for over two minutes for the random maze to be set up. Your quest starts at level 1, which is the dungeon level, and contains neither hazards nor objects. Pressing 'H' at any time displays a floor plan, which is built up gradually line by line and takes over 30 seconds to complete. Your position and that of the exit are then shown, and after ten seconds you are returned to the room display. Eventually, you reach the exit and you then have another two minutes plus wait while the second level maze is worked out.

You cross level 2 in the same way as level 1, but this time you have to cope with the vampire bats. These little monsters fly randomly around the ceiling of many of the rooms, and you either have to kill them or run away. Linger too long and the pain in the neck they give you is fatal! You have a gun to shoot them with, but only ten bullets (although you may come across more scattered in the maze). When you fire, a rather messy line is drawn vertically up the middle of the screen, and you have to hit the bat with it. You cannot aim your shot, so you have to rely on the bat flying into the right position (or wrong position from the bats point of view).

There are two other important things concerning bats. Firstly, you have to kill a certain number of them before you can progress to the next level (20 on the second; 30 on the third, and 40 on the fourth). Secondly, their radar system is a bit defective, so they all carry a floor plan so that they can find their way around the castle. This means that every time you kill a bat, you have a chance to find out where you are and where you want to go.

Also on level 2 and above are objects which might be of some use against the bats. There are eight other items apart from the ring and sword I mentioned earlier. There is a cloak that stops bats attacking, an apple that will speed you to the next level, a knife and a dagger, a floor plan, and finally three items without which no vampire move would be complete: a mirror, a clove of garlic and a silver cross. You can only carry up to three objects at any one time though.

Levels 3 and 4 are like level 2, except the bats are even harder to kill. If you reach level 5, then you get the chance to confront Count Dracula himself. Only one of the objects is an effective weapon against him, and I never lived long enough to find out which!

Provided you have been playing the game for at least 30 minutes, you can save the game onto tape. The entire 36K of the program is saved rather than just the data. After using the SAVE feature, as soon as the current game finishes (win or lose) the program does a NEW and you have to load from tape to play again. The same applies to the game you just saved to tape.

I'm afraid I think that Richard Shepherd has a rather too high opinion of his own program if he expects many people to spend three minutes loading it from tape, then two minutes waiting for the game to set itself up, only to have the program NEW if the SAVE feature is used!

Unlike Richard Shepherd's earlier adventures, Transylvanian Tower does not send any output to the printer. The program is entirely written in Basic, but if you attempt to break the program, for example, to dump the floor plan to the printer, that also causes the program to NEW.

This is a reasonable game for the very patient, but would be greatly improved if the maze were set up by machine code. The graphics are the best so far from Richard Shepherd, but still only adequate rather than inspired. It also struck me that this would be a desperately hard game to win. If you do manage it, I suggest you treat yourself to a Bloody Mary!