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Glasnost? Forget it! A million NATO nightmares have come true. The Red Army's sweeping across the plains of central Europe, the skies are black with Migs and, worst of all, the Allies' Atlantic supply routes are threatened by the Soviet Navy. Without reinforcements, ammunition and fuel, NATO will crumble, leaving the Warsaw Pact triumphant. The Navy's hour has come, and its primary offensive weapon is the nuclear submarine to be precise.

Can you save the beleaguered Western forces by wreaking havoc among Russian raiders? Have you the skill to send carrier fleets to the bottom of the ocean? Most importantly, could you survive a silent duel with a "wolf pack" bent on your destruction? It's time to leave Holy Loch and prove your nautical mettle in heated battle beneath the ice floes of the North Atlantic. This is Red Storm Rising, a sub simulator with a difference - it's exciting!

You are in sole control of the bridge, deciding what the sub does, who it shoots at and whether it survives. Using the classic Microprose keyboard overlay, the whole boat is in your hands: weapon selection, guidance, speed and depth, all variable at the touch of a button. The on-screen displays show your position, the water characteristics, detection probability and even sonar comparisons are you prepare to engage in battle. This is realism city and Red Storm Rising has taken up residence!

Using the political and tactical assumptions of Tom Clancy's novel Red Storm Rising, the manual goes beyond giving instructions and becomes a reference document on current and future developments in submarine warfare, its tactics, themes and traumas.

There are four dates on which the war can be fought: 1984, 1988, 1992 and 1996. These determine the type of vessel and armaments you and your Russian opponents possess, which in turn affect the strategies you'll use. Compounding this are four levels of difficulty from complete beginner to participation in the Red Storm Rising campaign. When even the choice of ship is taken into consideration, you can see this is no simple game of submerge, point and shoot!

The red storm really breaks when you eventually take to the high seas. However, all (yes all!) the informaton gathered from the 100 page booklet is needed for successful raiding. The beginner can have life easy, but never simple. The theory of submarine warfare is complex and subtle. It's a game of cat and mouse, relying on long range sensors to identify and then destroy foes. Only experience can tell you how and when to hide, the benefits and risks of good "active" sonar contacts, or how to surprise an enemy with long range wire-guided torpedoes.

Nothing is overlooked: the effect of water temperature on sonar emissions, the presence of thermal layers and even underwater weather must be taken into account. It's important to know where you can hide a 7,000 ton submarine in the open sea, and to know your blind spots and evasive techniques.

Once in battle, you acquire skills quickly. You fire torpedoes, judging the best time to activate their own logical hunting systems, and try to get to surface to loose off a harpoon missile at an aircraft carrier. This being done while you throw quick turns at high speed, creating water "knuckles", to confuse any torpedo breathing down your rudder.

Although it's far from silent, as you'll discover the first time an active sonar picks you out, it's not surprising that a game with a "run silent" feature has limited audio appeal. Visually the nature of the beast dictates that more maps and charts are used than traditional displays of controls. These are clear and flexible, allowing you to extract information as fast as possible - all maps have a zoom function for close examination of what's going down.

Most disappointing are the lame sinking sequences, which go on just too long. A detailed picture of the sub/ship in question just gets blammed, burns a little and gracefully sinks to the bottom... This is not what you learned to pilot a sub for!

A few hundred words cannot do justice to such a detailed and complex game. Only its atmosphere, its tense and intense gaming experience, can be described. Players of other Microprose techno-epics such as Gunship will understand the joy you feel when the submarine becomes your tool, and you finally understand how to employ it to total effect.

There's a strange satisfaction in outwitting the computer sub commander and dealing him a state of the art death. The complexity of the game is daunting to the first-time player, yet it's also the source of its appeal as a realistic shoot-'em-up that requires learning, skill and intuition. You want extensive gameplay fused with intensive action? Go hunt the bear, a big red Russian bear.