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Combining adventure epics with arcade action seems to be the fashion these days, and Sword of Kadash falls neatly into the slot of animated adventure.

According to the inlay you have been captured by fierce nomads in the Persian desert who have given you a rather limited choice: enter the Fortress of the Dragon and bring back the Sword of Kadash, or die.

In your quest for the sword you wander through the maze-like corridors of the fortress, fighting off ghosts, goblins and other nasties and collecting treasures and weaponry. With each object you acquire you gain experience, but each one seems to set off a trap or unleash a monster. I soon found my resistance to attacks (measured in hitpoints) running low.

There are three levels of difficulty and at the lowest you are resurrected several times. Even so, it took me just five minutes to expire permanently the first time I played. And that's where the problems really start. The program is provided on a double-sided disk. To load, you have to boot up the first side, then flip over and make a copy of the second side (the Master Character disk). The game then runs off your copy. This wouldn't be too bad if you could continue playing several times on one copy, but you have to make a new copy every time you lose a game!

The copying process takes more than two minutes with two disk drives, and I'd hate to find out how long it takes if you've got only one. Beginners could find themselves following up five minutes of play with an even longer spell of copying.

The graphics are average, which is less than I would expect from Penguin. Then again, with over 200 rooms and passages I suspect there wasn't enough memory available in 48K to go into too much detail. The animation is cute if uninspired and the joystick control is good.

The game offers a lot of variety and can get very tricky at level three, but the pace is too slow for arcade fanatics and the puzzles aren't very demanding on the intellect. They consist mainly of finding hidden passages by bashing against brick walls until a hole appears.

Good fun for a while, but not good value.