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Thrice upon a time sounds just a tiny bit daft, doesn't it?

So Ishar 3's an RPG then. For those of you who missed the first two, it's all set on a distant planet in the kingdom of Ishar, which is all a bit sword and sorcery based and not really ripped off from Tolkien books at all. Nope, no way. The bad bloke's some old gadgy called Shandar, but if you were successful in Ishar 2, you'll have killed him. Unfortunately for the good people of Ishar, death simply isn't a big enough stumbling block for Shandar, who now plans not only to reincarnate himself, but to use the body of the immortal Black Dragon Wohratax, the last of his species and the hardest hombre on the face of the planet. But as we all know, reincarnation can only take place when the planets are in alignment, which gives you a short time to thwart his evil plans.

Fantasy plotlines huh? They get me every time. What's wrong with going out on a limb occasionally? What's wrong with steering away from the typically sad, jaded, overused cliches of the fantasy genre? Ishar 3 features time gates which hurtle you into the past, but since the past just consists of jungles and forests instead of medieval cities, it's hardly groundbreaking stuff. From the very start, Ishar 3's packed with generic, non-specific fantasy pap, from orcs and elves to dragons and cute girls in leather bikinis. Oh dear.

You can attempt to stop Shandy turning into Weetabix in several ways. If you've played the previous games and got attached to your team, then you can use them. If you fancy bursting into pubs and shouting, "I'm going to save the world! Who will aid me on my quest?" then you can generate a single character and pick up the rest en route, but if you fancy an easy life, you can conjure up an entire team of five adventurers from the very start.

Despite the torrent of criticism that's about to erupt from my word processor, there's no getting away from the fact that Ishar 3 looks great. From the deepest dungeons to the streets of the city and the paths of the forest, it all looks gorgeous. The streets look lived in, the jungles look 'jungly' and all the incidental characters pout and pose in perfect digitised glory. I'll say it once again so you're left in absolutely no doubt - Ishar 3 looks great.

However...

I hated it from approximately 20 minutes after I started playing it, and for each and every minute of the long and tortuous hours that dragged by afterwards. For a start, going into any building in the city involves disk swapping, and the game doesn't recognise a second drive [Instant arbitrary percentage penalty - Kangaroo Court Judge]. To add insult to injury, you have to press Return once you've put the disk in, which I found out after I'd wandered off to make a cup of tea and came back to find I still had to sit and listen to the drive whirr away. You can't install it on the hard drive either. Grrrr.

The game's certainly massive, but also for the most part empty, resulting in miles and miles of fruitless wanderings. Quite often you bump into characters who don't speak, don't move and don't do anything at all really. You can't buy things off them and you can't hit them, so what's the point? They're just scenery.

The city forms only one of five giant locations, but it takes literally days of game time to get from one side to the other. This could be blamed on the control system (coming up in a bit) but it's mainly the stupidly compressed day/night cycle. Every few minutes real time, the sun sets and the night begins, and of course all the interesting places to visit are shut at night. Terrific. It's sort of like battling great hardship to arrive finally at the library in Alexandria (intellectual centre of the Hellenic empire from 323BC) and being told it's half-day closing.

You view the action from a first person perspective, which in many cases is a good idea. It works for Battlezone, it works for flight sims and it even works for Trick Or Treat, our coverdisk game from AP39. In my humble opinion, it doesn't work for Ishar 3. Or rather, the view works, but the movement doesn't. There isn't any animation involved, so you jump from one static shot to another one 25 feet down the trail, and if you turn you get a completely new view. With your direction shown only by a small compass, it's horribly easy to get lost even with the map.

The combat's equally dire. You just click on an icon to make a team member swipe and watch splots appear on you or the enemy. Since your attacks are a curious yellow, it looks like some kind of flan fight to the death, only not as interesting.

You'll have guessed that I'm not particularly taken by this one then. Adventure games are all about immersion in a strange and alien world, and this one doesn't do it for me. There's all manner of stuff that could well excite a hardened adventure gamer, but it's implemented so boringly and with such a creaky old game engine that I find it hard to believe myself. Certain team members won't get on for example, and if you decide to kill them off, this could well lead to further internecine strife, but to get to this kind of interesting in-fighting, you've got to be enthralled in the game world, and I never got that far. Ultima Underworld and Doom on the PC - now they're adventure games. Flashback, Worlds Of Legend and Monkey Island on the Amiga - top adventure games each and every one. Ishar 3 doesn't even get close.

Uppers: It looks great, it runs quickly, and it's compatible with the previous Ishar titles.

Downers: Ignores external and hard drives, rambling, empty levels, pathetic combat system, minimal interaction with other characters, cliched plotline and little or no enjoyment gained from playing it.

I find it hard to believe that people are still into this uninspired fantasy dross. If you are, you're going to be a bit more tolerant to this game, but there's no getting away from its ageing game engine, vacuous plot and empty levels. Even cutting it a bit of slack, it still only rates...