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Omnicron Conspiracy is best described as a graphical adventure. It's a whodunnit-in-space type of game - you need to visit a series of locations, search for objects and solve problems in an attempt to break an intergalactic drugs ring. All this is controlled from the joystick - there's none of this typing in long passages of text only to be told "I don't understand that!"

The game is set in deepest space. The character under your control goes by the unlikely name of Ace Powers. You start out in the sleeping quarters of your spacecraft, and almost immediately your robotic pal enters and tells you the Chief of Police wants to see you. After grabbing a couple of useful objects, you walk through the spacecraft to the bridge, tap in the star course the robot gave you, and you're off.

Ace walks in the direction you point the joystick in. Walk up to anything and its name is highlighted in a panel at the top of the screen. From here, pressing Fire brings up a small menu. The choices offered depend on the ways you're allowed to manipulate that particular item. Typically you can examine, search and maybe even use it. Find anything useful and you have six pockets, each capable of storing an object.

There are many other characters in the game, and bumping into one gives you the opportunity to converse. Actually it's more of a monologue: you can't tap in questions, or influence the answers they give. If they have anything to say they'll tell you about it; if they don't, they won't.

One thing you can't help but notice is the sluggish pace that the game plays at. Moving from one side of a room to another seems to take absolutely ages, and moving from room to room requires a disk access, as does attempting to examine anything! Making any sort of progress is annoyingly slow.

Sound is conspicuous by its absence: there isn't the slightest whimper. It's true to say that traditional adventures could get away without any sound (or graphics for that matter), but with a game of this type there's no excuse.

The game doesn't stun pixelwise, but the graphics are passable and everything is clear enough. The "action" takes place in a small window in the centre of the screen. The rest is filled up with information about what you're carrying, how tired and hungry you are, and where you are and what you can do about it.

A potentially good game is encumbered here by scandalously slow response and an unfriendly user interface. The menu systems are very clumsy indeed: it takes such a long time for a menu to appear that it's easy to think you haven't selected it properly and click again. Do that, however, and you merely succeed in switching it off as soon as it eventually does appear. Why couldn't we have got a nice friendly mouse-driven control system instead? It would have been ideal for this style of game.

Buried beneath the poorly implemented exterior, there could well be a very respectable game waiting to get out. It's sad then that only the most patient and determined players are likely to find it.