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Back in issue 15, Karl Foster described this game as suffering the typical failure of 'crop gameplay' (sic). How right he was, I think. Epic is certainly less than a-maize-ing and wasn't worth the long 'wheat'. A-ha ha ha. Sorry.

Epic is a poor relation to Wing Commander. It has a strikingly familiar this-could-be-the-end-of-the-human-race sort of plot (involving massive space convoys, pursuant villains and a sun going supernova) and your part in the drama is to pilot the ultra-sophisticated Epic starfighter and claim glorious victory. Did somebody say Battlestar Galactica? No? Good.

Epic suffers from 'programming myopia', that rare (maybe not so rare...) disease that makes people working closely on a game completely forget their audience. For example, Epic has great graphical interludes that try to tell the story, but they make no sense unless you've already read the story all the way through in the manual. And the mission orders. They're usually farcically incomplete, so that you spend ages hammering some ground installation, only to discover that there are another four over the horizon that you're supposed to blow up as well. Aaargh!

The game looks like a cross between Elite and terrestrial flight sims such as F-19. The graphics, which were great in their day, look just a little outclassed now. The game is mission structured, with the basic idea that you're sabotaging the villains' attempts to pinpoint the location of your ragtag fleet by blowing up radar stations and the like.

Successes and failures in certain missions supposedly take you down different routes in the story so that no two games are the same, etc, etc, but in practice this simply means that mission seven (the climactic showdown where the villains catch up with you - gasp) occurs as soon as you fail any one of the preceding missions.

The missions are too short (dumb), there's often a time limit on them (dumber) and the game has a cheat mode that's in the manual which means that you need never lose a battle (very dumb indeed, and neatly indicative of Epic's slapdash design). All of this adds up to a game that will last you about three hours. At the new budget price, that's still £5 an hour for some fairly tawdry entertainment, so I'd recommend that you give it a miss.

Still completely crop after all this time (sorry), Epic is just another one of those games that never lived up to its own hype. Avoid like the blight.