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Deary, deary me, this isn't very good, is it? As a matter of fact, I seem to be having a spell of bad luck at the moment. All the games I get aren't any good [Sorry, Tone - Ed]. Not that they don't have good ideas behind them. A lot of them promise to be quite good, Operation Neptune being quite a prime example. But when it comes down to it, they either just haven't been presented as well as they might, or they just don't work as a game.

I'm not sure which camp Operation Neptune falls into. Maybe the dull display could be jazzed up a bit? Use brighter colours perhaps? Maybe the game idea could be improved a bit? The idea of a mad professor threatening to destroy the world is fine enough. He has lots of underground bases, all interlinked and these contain his weapons. The only way you can destroy them is by piloting your submarine above the inter-connecting tubes, and then - leaving the sub and going down in the guise of a frogman - to drop a timebomb, then get the hell out of there.

The frogman bit is one of the two sub-games. The other comes into play, as it were, when you get attacked by the same force that you are fighting. At this point you go into the game's saving grace. You get out of the sub once again, only this time on an underwater jet bike and play an Afterburner-like game. You are viewed from behind and you have to bob and weave in and out of the fast-approaching reeds, plants and objects, while at the same time shooting down all the enemy fighters and nasties that dive down on you from above and fire dozens of missiles in your direction.

The one thing I can't understand is the mentality of the enemy pilots. There is only one of you, and there are loads of them, all on screen at once. Sounds like a bit of an unfair fight to me. Sounds a bit like a lost battle. But no, you see, even though there are up to half a dozen enemy fighters on screen at once, only one attacks you at a time. The rest just bob about in the distance waiting for their turn like Megadeath fans standing in line at the side of the stage, just waiting for their chance to jump off.

The graphics on the whole are well up to Infogrames standard. Still, graphics are attractive but the animation is a bit dodgy. The intro sequence is really nice, and colour has been used well throughout; but I wish things weren't all so dark. The jetbike sequence is really fun and the fast 3D update works really well.

Operation Neptune is just another Infogrames game. Nice graphics, a bit short on gameplay and short-lived.