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How many of you remember Tetris? For those of you who don't, it was one of the great PC games. The idea was to match a number of shapes or colours in a line, vertically, horizontally or diagonally. Its creator was a Russian named Alexey Pajitnov who I had the pleasure of meeting at the ECTS (European Computer Trade Show) some years ago. I'm pleased to say he spoke English, as my Russian is non-existent. Well Alexey endorses BreakThru!, and once you have played this you can definitely see far more than a passing resemblance to Tetris...

It has only a limited copy protection asking a question - answerable from the manual - the first time you play the game; this is the sort of protection no-one can complain about.

The program requires Windows with 4 megabytes of RAM and it takes 6 megabytes of hard disk space, and probably a mouse. The program comes on two high density disks and it has different installs for 16 or 256 colour displays. Mine took 5 megabytes of space. Once installed your only option is to select new game and an option screen appears, this cannot be bypassed and you cannot select saved game until these selections have been made, surely a bug? I later tried to set it to the hardest level and found the only way to do this was by quitting the game and restarting it.

The idea of the game is to dismantle walls made of different coloured bricks, two or more vertically or horizontally of the same colour will disappear when you click the mouse on them. At the basic level there are only four colours, it is against the clock with three different times, I settled on five minutes this being the middle one. Until I looked in the manual I had not twigged that if you try to get rid of all one colour first no more bricks of that colour will appear in that wall. To explain the last part of that statement, even though you are trying to dismantle a wall a number of new bricks appear along the top of the screen, the longer you take to clear a wall the more bricks that randomly fall. You can on occasions want bricks of a certain colour to help out as you often have orphan bricks that are difficult - sometimes impossible - to clear.

As you clear a wall a representation of the city the wall is set in appears in the space behind. All the games I played started in Berlin and after you dismantled four sections of wall you go on to repeat the exercise in various European and American cities.

A nice touch is being able to customise screen size; so many games settle for 640 x 480 resolution and that's it. In BreakThru! you can enlarge and reduce the playing area. How long before all products auto-detect the screen resolution? I suppose that is too much to ask, I know it's possible to do as I've seen it done, as to how hard it is, I don't.

On the level I played called Easy - I resisted playing at child level - I only ever had four colours of brick, I looked at the hard level and there were five colours. Before you think one extra colour would not make it much harder, I never completed any wall unless I eliminated one of the colours early on. With the aid of a special multi colour brick - click on it and then the next brick you click on all the bricks of that colour disappear - or by luck or dare I say skill.

You have help from "bombs" when they get to the bottom of the wall they can be exploded; this also takes all adjacent bricks as well.

Slightly less useful are "rockets" these fly in the direction they are facing once clicked on, and take out anything in that row or column.

"Tin Cans" are a pain, they can only be destroyed by "rockets" or "bombs". Lastly "spiders" are an added nuisance as they just get in the way; they interrupt the passage of falling items, and do not need to be cleared. If you think indiscriminate clicking on the screen will help you are wrong, you lose points if you click on an illegitimate move. Vast amounts of points can be scored by clicking on a large group of the same colour bricks.

I really liked this game and think it could be fiendishly difficult on the higher levels, especially if played on the shortest time setting. I recommend it and I give it 84%.

The game is by Spectrum Holobyte - whom I have not heard of - but it is distributed in this country by MicroProse. It should be available from dealers. In case of difficulty try MicroProse, The Ridge, Chipping Sodbury, Bristol, BS17 6AY; Phone 01454-326-532.