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You are Harper, landing from a scout ship in a war-town town, during the Rigellian war. Your dead colleague Elliot is at your feet. Only moments before, he was urging you to go in search of the Doomsday device - a Rigellian weapon which they planned to use to destroy the planet if they had lost the war. But before he could tell you how to go about this task, he took his last breath.

The game loads under an animated title screen - and you must keep an eye on it! The events leading up to the beginning of the game are described in text windows during the load - and it is absolutely essential reading if you are to solve the difficult-yet-obvious problem at the very start of the game.

Once that's out of the way, then you're free - or at least as free as you can be, faced with booby traps, and with tanks and vicious dogs roaming the street. But perhaps you'll find a way of avoiding them...?

The graphics are more informative and less regular in appearance than the usual variety of one per location, and combine nicely with Smart Egg's own adventure system to make a really polished adventure.

The text is impeccably written, with a past tense narrative following each command. This may sound rather strange, but it works very well in practice. Smart Egg's parser recognises three words (it accepts more but throws what it doesn't want away) and the vocabulary, coupled with the alternative combinations provided, makes play very flexible. Solving the problems is without the frustration of searching for the correct words - but you still have to find the solutions!

A number of the problems require a certain amount of lateral thinking, whilst a useful tip for some of the others, is to keep persevering if you seem to be making a bit of headway. A good pull or push on something may help shift it, but sometimes a second application of effort is required!

There are a number of screen effects which add a final polish, taking the whole package way out of the ordinary run of budget adventures, and into the upper levels of 'standard' priced games. Dissolving text, instant windows for footnotes and help messages, and occasional clearing of the screen by scrolling all text off it, makes the display method as superior as the guts of the adventure itself.

Complete with tape plus ramload, although not Quilled or GACed, Rigel's Revenge is a two parter - so you can see there's a lot to it! It's the best budget title I have yet seen - and better than many a 'full-price' adventure too. At £1.99 you can't go wrong.