Your city faces perils greater than your army can deal with. Go ask the neighbours for help, seek companions from the tavern and, if you succeed, the rewards will be great. Sure. Is that before or after tax?

Legend Of Faerghail spans four disks and an equally heavy duty game world. Your first task - after following some advice about backing up the game - is to see whether any of the locals has what it takes. This opening enables you to select characters of either sex from every imaginable fantasy race and over a dozen different occupations.

That done, you can visit the Guild for training in magic, martial arts and languages, or the temple, or a particularly well equipped general store with a motormouth proprietor. Type in the initial of the place you want to visit or click on the mouse and there you are.

Take a walk outside the town walls and into the derelict castle and the viewing window goes black, with only an occasional flash of lightning revealing details for just a second. Cast a light spell or get the matches out and you see the grim interior, then some depressingly dressed strangers of the "Can't See His Face Through That Hood But His Eyes Are Glowing" variety. These are the game's monsters as seen from a distance (best way, really); get too cosy and their true nature is revealed in slime-soaked technicolour.

The message window presents options like Say Hi, Wave, Hit on the Head and Run For It. You can handle the ensuing combat either by giving each character precise instructions or leaving it to the Quick Combat option. in a tempting departure from the expected, you can also try to confer with your would-be opponents - though the longer you spend doing this, the fewer options you're left with when it comes to the crunch.

Graphics and sound are both excellent; when you walk across the moors you can really hear the wind tugging at your cloaks. The effects of combat are not as immediate as in games like Dungeon Master or Xenophobe, where the opponent is animated in the main display screen, but game time only progresses when you actually make a move - and the graphics are always appealing (unless you forget to light a torch).

The manual contains an unpretentious fantasy story written well enough to show most of its contemporaries up for the overblown garbage that they are. A four disk game, however, should always be viewed with suspicion. It shouts "Big Game!" but whispers "lots of swaps", and so it is.

You're frequently asked for one or another of the disks, and before long you know what to expect: it appears that one disk stores locations, another encounters, another game management routines, and so on. You lucky hard drive owners score again here; there's even an Install program bundled with the game. Also, though Legend Of Faerghail can run on a half-meg machine, it takes advantage of memory expansions beyond that to keep disk accesses to a minimum.

Legend Of Faerghail does, however, have polish as well as depth. The characters offer more potential than those of any other RPG and the game provides a challenge to match. If you can't kick the RPG habit or still wonder just how much you can get out of a game, get yourself Legend Of Faerghail.