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They must be stupid in the future. According to game designers, sci-fi novelists, comic book authors and HG Wells, machines will eventually become so intelligent that they'll take over the world and exterminate the human race for being inefficient. My point is, why do these futuristic clods build the machines to be incredibly intelligent then?

Don't they see the potential danger if their super-duper ST5000 (or whatever) is wired into every defence system on the planet? Anything could happen. One slip, and it could doom mankind. One of the system operators could inadvertently leave a copy of "You Got An Ology?" lying on a table, and then everybody would be in a pickle.

Anyway, in Cybercon 3 the computer has been built, the systems wired up and the book left behind, and Operation Pretty Pickle is go. As The Volunteer it's up to you to nobble the computer and save what's left of the world with the aid of a big metal suit.

What we've got here is a 3D-filled walky-talky puzzley-shooty game (to use the technical term). You have to penetrate Cybercon's defences (naturally increasingly deadly) and blow up its brain, on the way opening various locked doors, picking up various objects and solving various puzzles (usually involving the various doors and/or various objects).

The main problem with Cybercon 3 is that we've seen it all before (or, considering its age, seen it all again since). The graphics are suitably fast, the sound is suitably creepy, the puzzles are suitably tricky and the defence robots are suitable blasts. But there's nothing that really leaps out and grabs the attention.

You walk around a bit, find a puzzle, defeat some robots and get killed. Then you try again but get slightly further. And so on. There are some really good ideas - for one thing, you can jump, which is a novelty - but the gameplay isn't quite "there". The odds seem stacked rather heavily against you from the start, and the clumsy control method (which loads of inertia and supplementary keyboard controls) beings to grate after you've crashed into a doorway while trying to escape from a guard and simultaneously access one of your systems for the sixth time in a row.

Cybercon 3 has much to recommend it. It's very big, very smart and thankfully comes on a single disk, but I found it curiously uninvolving. When you get beaten by certain puzzle, that "I'll get you next time" feeling just isn't there.

1. Zippy 3D. High on atmosphere. A host of puzzles (and things to shoot).

1. But it's not very pleasant or exciting.