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Picture the scene; writer walks into office for first time and finds desk. Glacing at all the strange people, he loads up the game he's been left to review. It's a strategy game. He wonders about life as a sandwich man.

We start in the 18th century, a pioneer on a mission to become the most powerful man on the planet by colonizing as many lands as possible. This is achieved by floating around the world at one nautical mile per fortnight in a ship laden down with people and cargo.

The game begins by showing you a picture of your desk. Here you can buy a ship, stock it, and send it off anywhere in the world (as long as there's already a port or settlement there). Sailing around involves simply placing a cross on a map, though if you really want to take a more active role in your sailing you can plot a more complicated or detailed route by placing more than one cross on the map at the time.

Once you've come to a port, the game really, erm, "starts". After spending about ten minutes trying to coax the ship to dock, you can unload your people and set them to work - building houses, producing goods and doing all sorts of colonizing things. This actually means they wander about the shop doing absolutely nothing - you control them in a Lemmings fashion, clicking on each unit and telling it either to move, or build or to start producing.

From then on, the game revolves around setting up more ships to build a fleet (from the money your colonists make or from a hefty bank loan), moving your cargo ships around to pick up the goods your colonists produce, sending battleships after the pirates and paying off the bank loan.

Before we go any further, is anyone really interested in colonizing the world? Battling against an enemy army on a ridge is fun (several billion strategy games since the dawn of time, UMS being just one), as is attempting to conquer a territory (bits of North And Sound). The problem of colonizing is that there's no real meat to it - can you wander around dropping off blokes on islands, trading and occasionally encountering pirates? The last thing a strategy game needs is a scenario with nothing going on.

And then there are strategy nuts. If you look deep enough into any game, you'll find some basic element of strategy. Merchant Colony actually has quite a few on paper - you can form little battle fleets to patrol your waters, manage your accounts to build better communities, time voyages and ships, and even hunt down pirates. If you're into that type of strategy, you'll find something here to interest you, but for no longer than a few hours.

The other major problem Merchant Colony faces is the control system. For some reason, we're destined to control everything with an icon system that's about as friendly as the Kray twins at a Neighbourhood Watch meeting - the icons give nothing away as to their functions, and everything's made especially awkward by the fact that you have to be quite precise with your clicking at times.

The big requirement for accuracy is carried through the rest of the game - docking at a port seems to mean guessing which pixel of the sea your ship's supposed to be sitting on when you tell it to dock. This is something that would have taken a few minutes of any programmer's time to fix, but for some reason it's been left like that. Other oversights include the ship's inability to let you know when they arrive at port (you can switch to the ship and look manually so they may as well tell you), automatically navigate small islands or even let colonists get back on board. That seems to be the underlying theme of Merchant Colony - a little thought, but not enough to do the job.

The graphics are adequate but nothing at all impressive or even pleasing, as are the sound effects. As we've already seen the scenario needs serious help and so does the control system, and the gameplay is limited. If you liked Pirates from MicroProse, play that instead. If you didn't like it, you won't like Merchant Colony either. If you're really interested in all things colonial, buy a text adventure or a trashy novel.

1. The strategy involved in colonizing.

1. Unfortunately, colonizing has no pace.
2. Slow, repetitive and unfriendly.