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There's more to the art of burglary, you know, than simply brandishing a sawn-off shot gun or rummaging through someone's drawers. The big money is in the banks, and in Revelation you're heading for the vaults to seek your fortune.

Things have changed though. Safe-cracking isn't a case of lighting the fuse and taking cover any more. It's far more sophisticated than that, and requires a good deal of logic and cunning. In this game you're dealing with combination safes and you have to crack the codes to get to the cash.

Each of the 80 or so screens shows an arrangement of ocks, tumblers and dials, all of which have colour-coded segments. To crack the safe, you must match all the locks to the same colour tumbler.

You cannot turn the tumblers directly, so it requires a bit of lateral thinking to get the safe open. When you get two adjacent wheels the same colour, for example, the neighbouring wheel spins in a clockwise direction. You must turn the dials so as to trigger such a chain reaction and line up the locks. Unfortunately, the dials can be turned only in 90 degree increments and often you get one lock open to find that another has closed again.

The backgrounds do change often enough, but are frequently repeated and irrelevant to the gameplay. The dials themselves are scaled up or down in size depending on how many are on-screen, but even when they shrink to the tiniest size it's still easy to make out their colours - just as well, since that's the whole point.

Revelation is just too darn difficult! You often have more success by turning the dials in a random blind panic than by studying the situation carefully. Various icons try to compensate for this - especially the ones that freeze the game until your next action. But that's half the problem. You can pause indefinitely to work out exactly what you need to do before continuing - but with no incentive to go on, quite likely not bother.

Revelation doesn't keep you up until four in the morning. It just hasn't got the addictiveness of other puzzle games. After the first few irritating plays, you simply don't have the patience to try and crack the thing.