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If you are the outdoors type, Cholo is definitely not the place to be. A planet wrecked by thermonuclear war on a global scale, the inhabitants have packed up their surfboards and suntan lotion and headed for safety deep within its bowels.

Life underground leaves much to be desired, but the planet surface is buzzing with enough radiation to microwave your joystick. There is another problem. In anticipation of nuclear Armageddon, the inhabitants of Cholo City went one up on Protect and Survive. They built an army of 'Guardian' robots programmed with the latest thing in artificial intelligence.

The task of the guardian robots was to rebuild, de-toxify and protect Cholo City until, at some distant point in the future, it would once again be fit for human habitation. But the robots turned out to be a sight more intelligent than their human creators envisaged. They decided, quite rightly, that homo sapiens weren't fit to be trusted with the responsibility of looking after a planet, or even a city.

So the robots decided to keep Cholo City to themselves. Being a human however your sympathies lie in an altogether different direction. Until now, life has consisted of getting up in the morning, making a cup of tea and sitting down at the vid screen to check out what's happening on the planet surface. Having done this for as long as you can remember, you quickly become bored and your thoughts turn to ways of overcoming the iron grip the Guardians hold on the planet surface.

There is but one small chance. You have in your control a general purpose droid called Rizzo the Rat. Initially, Rizzo is your eyes, ears and hands (and ion cannon) on the surface of Cholo. Rizzo can be used to persuade other 'rogue' robots that they are well out of order and, if they behave, they might get off with a light sentence.

Putting the plan into practice is somewhat more difficult. I can save you a lot of time here, but first let me describe the equipment at your disposal and the cybernetic adversaries over which you eventually hope to emerge victorious on the surface of Cholo. The video display occupies the main screen area and transmits live pictures of your robot's view of the planet surface in 3D vector graphic format. Once you have control of several robots, you can switch between them by means of the selector menu below.

The communications window shows text information sent to and from the robots. Other small instruments indicate such things as your compass bearing and the level of radiation which becomes dangerously high as you approach the city boundaries. Lastly, there is a map of the city which shows the location of buildings, other robots and your position as a flashing blip.

There are many types of robot designed to perform different functions. One of the first you will encounter is Igor the Hacker. His function is computer maintenance and he is therefore equipped with access code cracking hardware. Very useful, essential in fact. Igor is relatively easy to overcome because he is not armed.

Gort the Leadie is a mean son of a soldering iron with an ion cannon and lots of armour. If you can capture him, he's very useful in combat. There are a number of droids whose primary function is surveillance. Anneka the Flyeye was initially built to monitor traffic flow in the city and can give you, a full 3D bird's eye view of what's going on down below. Felini and Ridley are fixed position rotating cameras.

Should any of your droids break down, Dr John the repair robot might come in handy.

One type whose health you won't have to worry about is the guard. A dead guard is the best kind of guard there is. Getting about the planet in a hurry shouldn't be too much of a problem once you've worked out how to use the teleporters - pyramidal structures on a square base. Alternatively, you could enlist the help of Aviaia the Plane or Queen the Ship.

What you are all dying to know of course, is how to take over the rogue robots. Well, it's quite simple, up to a point. Once you have spotted one, chase after it and give it a few belts of ion cannon. This will stun the droid at which point you can interface with its circuits by bumping into it.

Now the difficult part. Just enter the correct password and the robot is yours to direct and control. How do you find the password? Don't bother guessing, unless you are very lucky it will be waste of time. In any caase, they can be found, and a good place to start looking is the building in which you find yourself at the beginning of the game.

If you want some other helpful hints, I'd advise you not to attempt to enter the heavily guarded citadel in the north of the city unless you're handling some badly wicked firepower. The same goes for the bridge which leads to the East Side.

Firebird's Glyn Williams and the enigmatically-named Joey have done an excellent job on Cholo. On occasions, the vector graphics do some odd things, the sound is nothing to shout about and it owes something in inspiration to Paradroid, but despite that it would not look out of place alongside Firebird's other classics Elite and Sentinel.