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Anyone remember Cyborg? Released by CRL almost a year ago, it was a mildly intriguing but frequently irritating exploration game. Things weren't helped by some feeble sound effects and blocky graphics, combined with grossly inadequate instructions.

So it's a bit surprising that CRL has now produced a sequel - Mandroid - which, though different in many respects, still suffers from all the shortcomings of the earlier game.

Yet again the inlay card tells you sweet Felicity Adams, other than that your mission this time is to seek and destroy the evil Max, who is using stolen Mandroid designs to construct a vast cyborg army. Shrugging, you start to load the program, and it's only at this point that you discover (from a message hidden on the loading screen) that further information cab be found on the flip side of the cassette. So you stop the tape, rewind it, and load Side B - an annoying and totally unnecessary procedure which could have been avoided if CRL had taken the trouble the label the cassette properly or, better still, supplied a detailed instruction sheet!

This library section on the B side consists of a dozen screens of text and legoland graphics. These are supposed to help you identify the bandits, thieves, guards, whores and other lifeforms which you'll encounter in the game. Apart from the women and some assorted droids and robots, most of the characters look so similar that by the time you've loaded side A again you've forgotten which is which.

As in Cyborg, all the action takes place in a narrow strip across the top of the screen, the space below reserved for the various control panels and icon screens that you'll come across during play. These include a Communications menu, which allows you to interrogate, threaten and bribe any passers-by who you bump into, and also the Weapons display, enabling you to swap your hand-gun for a laser rifle, grenade or any other weapon which you've acquired.

The playing area is large: a sprawling landscape of boulder-strewn sands, stagnant pools, dirty rivers and streets of shell-damaged buildings, depicted in adequate but uninspired graphics. Portals and bridges lead into adjacent screens, and the houses are warrens of interconnecting rooms.

Charting your way through this maze is a thankless task, made more difficult by the hordes of villains who swarm in all directions, guns at the ready. If you stop and question them successfully - a laborious task in itself, involving a lot of juggling with joystick and function keys - they might cough up some useful information about the map, or sell you a gun. More often though, they walk away or worse still, you accidentally shoot them. Once shots are fired, the natives get unfriendly, and you're in for a surprisingly tedious shoot-out.

Cash dispensers can be used to obtain funds for buying guns or bribing bandits, and these funds can be further increased by playing the fruit machines found in some of the buildings. There are other goodies for you to discover, and most useful of all is the little spacecraft which allows you to travel at speed across the terrain, splattering any unfortunate bods who happen to get in the way.

But such occasional delights don't do much to compensate for the poverty of the animation and sound, and mind-numbing repetition of the gameplay. There's no scoring facility, or indeed any indication of how near you are to completing the game, and you've only got one life - lose that and the whole frustrating unrewarding, process begins all over again.