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The most dangerous job in the Air Force is bomb disposal, so quite sensibly they get robots to do the dirty work for them. There is no compassion for a robot but that is your vocation in life.

The building is full of bombs - there is probably some good reason for this, but. you have to save it. Unless you can use your droids to take the bombs to a window and throw them out. What the neighbours will think is irrelevant.

The building is in 2D, across and down, but the rooms are in 3D. As your robot moves around a room he (are robots male?) gets convincingly larger and smaller. The building is full of walls - otherwise the ceiling falls down - and not all the walls have doors in them. Some of the floors have holes which allow you to fall from level to level and others have poles which help your metal man climb up levels.

To jump from one area of the building to another there are transporter pads. Unfortunately whoever planted the bombs also disabled the computer which operates the transporters. To get them working again you'll have to find the missing circuit boards and repair the computer. Even with the transporters working you cannot move a single droid through the whole building. And some of the bombs are not accessible to the robot which can get to the external window.

To get a bomb from the depths of the building to the robot which can then dispose of it you have to partake in a cross between Russian roulette and pass the parcel. Yout robot must pick up the bomb and throw it through an internal window to another robot, which can then take it to the next robot or to the exit.

To get the bomb through the window you need to line yourself up on the tiled floor and select the correct angle of elevation, Bombs are fragile. drop them four times and BOOM - the bomb, robot and room are all destroyed. Catching the bombs is made more difficult by varying gravity levels in different rooms. In later buildings rooms rotate and make things very confusing.

The hardest thing of all is avoiding enemy droids. These follow you from room to room, even if you use a transporter. Just touching one spells instant doom. Your only escape is to run away, jumping through holes in the floor until your pursuer finally cracks. Some doors are electrified, as are some of the fireman's poles - you'll need to fix them before worrying about the bombs.

The game gets progressively harder and should satisfy the most dexterous games player.

These robots are not my cup of oil. You can't shoot the enemy and getting the transporters to work is a fiddle. There is nothing more frustating than running from a robot, jumping on a faulty transporter and re-materializing in the same place to greet instant death.

Maybe if you played the game from the robot's viewpoint it would be more exciting, albeit even more dificult to play. I found the selection of which robot you controlled awkward and soon hung up my joystick.

Deactivators is good because it is original, but it is not exciting - more absorbing and mind taxing. It is certainly a game which takes some learning and should not be attempted without reading the instructions. You need to learn the layout of the buildings, making a model in your head - so adventure fans should feel at home.

I found the game too hard, all that running away from robots made me feel like Dr Who. The sense of achievment on finishing the first level is worth the graft.

I found this horrifically difficult. It was only the cuteness of the metal men which made me continue - that and the insistence of the editor.

Deactivators is a thinking game. You need to have a good look around the building, work out your routes and then execute the moves. It's the game that goes on inside your head which matters - what happens on the screen is less important. That is not to say that the graphics are poor, they are competent and effective, adding to the game.

Deactivators is not something you can load up for a quick zap - more an evening's entertainment.