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I enjoyed Message From Andromeda which, as one of Interceptor's earlier adventures, so I was quite looking forward to playing Warlord when it arrived. However, having played it for a while, I now have a rather mixed view of it. On the whole I quite like it, but I do feel that some rather sloppy flaws have been allowed to creep in, which could easily have been weeded out in the early stages of development.

The plot casts you in the role of a Celtic Warlord, cast onto some strange Otherworld. Your task is not just to find your way back to the real world, but to do so before a Roman Warlord, who has also been placed on that world. Both you and the Roman are the champions of your people, and the first to return can claim victory in the way between your two nations.

Thankfully, the plot is quite original, with nary a dwarf in sight. The graphics of the various locations, though quite small, are instantly drawn and highly detailed. Excellent use was made of shading in these pictures, often using very small groups of pixels, and clearly a lot of effort has gone into them.

I wish though that a similar attention to detail had been lavished upon the game's vocabulary. Any adventure that does not recognise the verb 'Open' is clearly going to come in for some criticism, and rightly so. Another aspect of the game that I found irritating was that often, upon arriving at a new location, you will be told that you can see, for example, a tree or a bridge.

Then, as soon as you attempt to manipulate or examine these things, it turns out that the program does not recognise the words 'tree' or 'bridge'. There doesn't appear to be a 'Help' facility either, which is something I missed a lot. Oh, and the dreaded spelling mistakes crop up too, with 'weapon' spelt 'weopon'.

As I mentioned earlier, those sorts of flaws are just plain sloppy and could easily have been dealt with before the game was released.

That aside, the adventure, nonetheless, manages to generate a fair bit of interest right from the start, and this, I think, is almost entirely due to the quality of the graphics. The text seems to be fairly businesslike.

The adventure is rated "advanced", and I think I'd agree with that, having made little progress so far, and having come to a halt at a bridge guarded by a warrior. I will go back to Warlord, but I'd be more confident if I felt that I would get the occasional helpful response from the game.