In the future, near - but just out of our reach - is the world of our children's children, who, having discovered that the greenhouse effect had melted the polar ice-caps, couldn't stand the heat and so dived deep in the cool and inviting seas. In the beginning, it was so dangerous that the pioneers sent down replicants: intelligent robots that could reproduce themselves. They built up the networks, but now, as humans settle in, it is discovered that, left to themselves, the replicants mutated and now are threatening to destroy the underwater world. Mankind's only hope is to find the U.I.M. (or Ultra Intelligent Machine). Its creator unknown, it has an answer for every question and a question for every answer.

An imaginative introduction for what is essentially Elite in a paper-thin disguise. It has, so they say, taken two and a half years to write - the game, not the introduction.

When you first boot p, you are confronted by a recognizable, though rather crude, spinning wire-frame globe. Underneath is the amazingly poor control panel, which looks as if it was created in mode 2 on the BBC and transferred across without changing the colour scheme. Once you have started the game however, and gone out into the ocean (which looks remarkably like space, what with being black, with stars and having submarines that look very much like space-ships!), the 3D solid graphics are very impressive.

They are also very fast and impossible to shoot, to start with, because you only have a weak laser. As you build up more firepower and skill though, you become more adept at blasting them out of existence. It is hard to tell which are other people's submarines and which are replicants but, of course, you shoot them all regardless.

There are 256 networks, each of which contain several hundred ports. There is a mission to be completed in each network which enables you to progress to the next one. All missions are of the fetch-and-carry type, delivering important documents or drugs, etc, and all have a reward of either cash or a piece of otherwise unobtainable equipment.

Money can be raised to buy extra equipment or a mission module bounty hunting (not advisable at the beginning of the game, because you don't stand a chance) or trading in commodities. If you rent the right equipment, you can manufacture your own products as well. Also, if you possess a portfolio hexagon, you can trade in shares and even, only for the real "professionals", different types of currency.

The manual is written very cleverly and with a good deal of thought, and each company that you can buy shares in, along with every form of currency, is described in detail, giving a history of its ups and downs and current standing and reliability. If you purchase a Financial module, you can even have a line graph displayed!

Though the game is a blatant Elite clone, it contains many innovations of its own. For example, when moving from one port to another, you actually out of the sea and have to keep to a re-entry curver into the wire-frame earth you saw at the beginning, in order to get to your chosen port. If you are too far off course you can heat up and get fried! Later in the game you can buy a re-entry module which will do this for you, rather like a docking computer. Entering an actual port, once you are there, is easy. It involves flying into a spinning pink and white diamond. This, like all the graphics, uses computer-calculated shading and is extremely effective.

For all its clever detail of implementation, U.I.M. fails to capture the most important aspect of Elite - its ultimate measure of *playability* which caused most of us to become instant and semi-permanent addicts. Perhaps the strategy is too complicated here, the combat too hard to get into. It's hard to say what is missing, but if this really was the Archimedes Elite, everyone in my house would be wanting to play it all the time - but for some reason they are not. And neither am I.

A near miss.