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You'd think they'd learn. On capturing Triax, a psychopathic genetic engineer who used to tamper with the brains and bodies of his victims and turn them into mindless "terminators", the Earth authorities put him on trial. On finding him guilty of a series of heinous crimes, though, the bungling fools completely fail to do the universe a favour and shoot the mad old bugger, choosing instead to fire him out into space to drift around helplessly for the rest of his life. (Clearly no-one in authority at the time has ever seen Superman 2.)

Anyway, predictably enough, Triax escapes and sets himself up on a small out-of-the-way planet, where he continues in his unpleasant ways until he is disturbed by a colonisation force. The force soon discover that he hasn't lost his touch with genes - they are swiftly wiped out by a host of grisly mutants, but luckily not before they manage to get off a distress message. Answering the call, you set off for the planet Phoebus, your mission being to rescue any living colonists and give Triax what he should have had in the first place - a bullet in the head.

Exile is an arcade adventure in the original sense of the term. Your character is controlled by joystick (or a mix of joystick and keys if you prefer) but progress through the game is much less a matter of alien-zapping and much more reliant on solving tricky and perplexing problems. You can't be killed as such (you carry a personal teleporter which whisks you back to the safety of your ship if you get into dire trouble), but there is a time limit, and you don't want to have to spend too much time retracing your steps through the game's enormous caverns, so extreme care is advised. And basically it's as simple as that. Except, of course, it isn't...

Exile is one of the most taxing games you're ever likely to play. The arcade aspect is challenging enough, but the puzzles are so devious that you spend as much time sitting around and wracking your mind as you do flying around and doing things. Yet they're always, tantalisingly, just within the reach of logic - when you finally solve one you go, "But that was so obvious!"

There are a whole slew of keys and icons to remember, but if you do as you're told and follow the manual for the first game or two, they become second nature, to the extent that you don't have to consciously think about them at all. You also then find yourself using a control system so flexible and useful that you wonder how you ever put up with anything less. The puzzles are so tough that the sense of triumph you get from completing one is enough to see you through the next three hours of struggling without complaint, and the alien mutants so alive with character that you whoop with joy every time you manage to mangle one of the little horrors.

Play Exile for hours (and you will, because you can't die!) and you only scratch the surface, but you always make enough progress to want to carry on and get just a little bit further. Buy this game and you may not want another until next Christmas!

1. Graphics are smaller than those in Turrican 2, but they do their job adequately
2. The best blend of depth and playability all year
3. Like Baal, incredibly tough, but incredibly rewarding when you do get something right
4. A masterpiece - there's no other word for it