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Not quite as jingoistic as most games based on the American armed forces, the euphemisms are flying from the first sentence on the inlay card. The game is set in a "politically sensitive country", a few hours' flight from the United States, which is composed almost entirely of jungle.

You have to capture Nato peace documents which have been stolen by a spy. You are aided and abetted by a dog called Killer who has got lost. After finding him, you can move around the map, kill the enemy soldiers, destroy their helicopter base and enter their encampment.

Various items help you, a direction finder which can latch on to radar beacons, a message decoder to receive satellite transmissions and a torch. All are selected using the now ubiquitous icon control system.

Telecomsoft's programmers seem to have a mania for representing 3D playing grids on a 2D screen with no isometric graphics to be seen; have they suddenly gone out of fashion?

GI Hero is yet another example. Point your man into the screen and press the up control to move to a different level; too bad if you get confused. Keyboard or joystick controls can be selected using the wonderfully logical Q for keyboard and A for joystick.

The impossible has been done in simulating the Spectrum's attribute problems. For those who have been lucky enough never to encounter this, our rubber friend the Spectrum can only have two colours per character square; any more and you get a mess. Your man, and everything else that moves, has a wide black border, previously reserved for mourning cards. This is to stop the ever-so-nasty - yet non-existent on the Amstrad! - colour clashes.

Every graphic, without fail, is in one colour-you'd think the CPC had only the loud primary hues of the Spectrum palette, such is the subtlety with which they have been chosen. The sole advantage of this is that there is no problem in green.

After getting up-I fell off the chair laughing - I would say GI Hero would be passable if the program simulated mud wrestling rather than the work of a trained assassin. The graphics are very large, very slow moving, and very jerky.

The tune is the de rigeur impersonation of rock music, with a few more beeps than normal betraying its ancestry. Sound effects are limited to a few desultory bangs and crashes,

This game isn't good enough. Not even at budget price. Which it isn't.