Once again, this time on the Falcon, the people need someone to do battle with the forces of darkness

There's always someone spoiling things, isn't there? No sooner have the islands of Arborea become the kind of place you feel safe letting the kids roam around in, than a syndicate of odious misfits starts causing trouble. Your reaction is obvious. You round up a small group of adventuring types and go around hitting people who don't co-operate and nick their stuff. Ishar 2 is a vast fantasy role playing game with all the magic, monsters and strange old men in lurking in the woods that you would expect.

There's nothing new in the formula. The adventure is divided up into a series of missions. It's virtually the same as Ishar 2 for the ST but improvements have been made for this Falcon version.

As with all RPGs you recruit various characters to help you. You need to equip your chaps with suitable sharp instruments, metal suits and lots of sandwiches. Each character has a profession and various attributes and skills. You need a well balanced party to make it; a priest and a magician being essential characters.

If you've played the original Ishar, you're going to feel at home straight away - the look and feel of the game is very similar. The method of spell casting has been improved and at last you get a map that actually shows you where you are. The action takes place over fourteen different islands and is three times bigger than the prequel. Characters from the first game can be loaded in so you can keep all your old adventuring buddies, just like the old days. It's all mouse-controlled with a few keyboard shortcuts and very easy to get into, one quick read of the manual is enough to get you into the thick of things.

The graphics are superbly colourful - it uses the Falcon's 256-colour mode to good effect. Everything is detailed and atmospheric and every island has a distinctive new set of graphics. The backgrounds and sprites are simply luscious. When it gets dark, the entire palettet fades to a range of dark colours and lights appear in the windows of the buildings and at dawn everything is given an orange hue.

The sound is pretty special too. At the beginning of the game, you have the option to have continuous 8-track music along with the sound effects. Each new area brings its own sounds, from croaking frogs and birdsong to moans and clanking chains - all in glorious stereo.

The gameplay is the same as the ST version, although everything moves faster, curing one of the ST version's main problems. There are no extra characters or missions to really make the Falcon version particularly stand out, although the extra graphics and sound capabilities are used well.

If you consider yourself a fan of this style of game and you've got a Falcon then you've no excuse but to get Ishar 2 - it's right up your street. It's simply to play, huge in size and once you start adventuring it's difficult to stop.

It's not easy at first, you wander around getting clobbered until you work out some tactics and what your objective is. The game suffers a little from being quite linear. If you don't finish the first quest you can't even get off the first island.

There is a lot of exploring to do, even though you have a map you still need to know the locations of the all-important shops and inns. Sometimes all the wanderings gets a bit much, until you suss the mission and set sail for the next island, and a whole new set of challenges.

The Falcon version of Ishar 2 plays one mean game and looks and sounds divine - a highly recommended game.

1. Simple to play but has loads of depth.
2. Huge and varied world to clump around in.
3. Brilliant graphics and sound.

1. Too much exploring to do which slows things down.
2. You can't really talk to anyone which gives you a slightly detached feeling to the environment.