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I've spent the last few minutes trying unsuccessfully to work out how to get my word processor to do those French 'e's with accents over them. The trouble is that the word 'cliche' looks a bit silly without one, so trying to review a game as ridden with the things as this could be slightly tricky. I'll just have to think of a different word, I suppose. 'Stereotype', maybe, or 'hackneyed'. Either one could be applied (with the aid of a few judicious prepositions) to Rise Of The Dragon, which combines the tritest of murder-mystery/P.I./futuristic plots with a distinctly run-of-the-mill icons/graphic-adventure/cinemawossname interface, yet somehow manages to come out of it looking like a pretty impressive game.

The storyline takes the usual pessimistic computer game view of the future: drugs and crime have taken over, dry ice wafts menacingly down the dimly-lit streets and everyone dresses in leather thongs. Nothing unusual there, but the mayor has got something more serious on his mind. His daughter's been killed by some 'bad dope' and, fearing something sinister's afoot but wishing to keep the incident quiet, he's asked private investigator William 'Blade' Hammer to look into it. Unknown to 'Blade', however, he's about to take on more than he bargained for. The trouble is (it says here) that, as prophesised, the one known as 'The Dragon' has returned to restore chaos to the universe and rule once more.

The game kicks off in Blade's apartment, and follows the usual course of examining things, picking them up, operating them, moving from location to location and interacting with other characters in the hope of solving the mystery. However, unlike the majority of other cinemawhatchacallit games, you don't get to see your character on screen. Instead, you see the world through Blade's eyes, which opens the way for a series of attractively drawn stills, with a little decoratively drawn stills, with a little decorative animation in each, rather than a Monkey Island-style animated extravaganza. It's a question of taste, of course, but I tend to find that the approach used here can reduce a game to a string of graphical setpieces with not much in between.

Scale is the other thing that sets Rise Of The Dragon apart from everything else. It comes on (gulp!) ten (yes, ten!) disks, and incredibly manages to arrange it so that you'll need just about all of them in the first five minutes of playing!

This is clearly a ridiculous state of affairs, even if you've got two disk drives, and a hard drive is an absolute must. Even then, you'll need to find about eight megabytes of space on it, which is nearly half of an A590. Have these people never heard of data compression? Hmmm? Needless to say, to play the game at all you'll need at least one meg of memory, and to play the game at its best this all ought to be Chip RAM.

Staggering statistics, then, but does the game justify them? It's easy to get to grips with, you've got to give it that. Although there's yet another system of mouse clicks to learn, it's picked up fairly quickly and proves to be fast and effective in practice. The game isn't let down on the programming front either. Everything looks neat and tidy, and works as it should, and there are plenty of 'extras' like your VidPhone which is sort of an answering machine with pictures - and a couple of arcade sequences. There is one problem, though, and it's one which is perhaps only to be expected.

Despite its boast of being highly flexible, with all sorts of possible outcomes to each situation, the game does tend to push you in the direction it wants you to go in most of the time - you can't actually do very much that lies outside the scope of the plot. You can only talk to people the game wants you to talk to, and you can only say what it wants you to say (with a few multiple choices, but the choices are usually pretty ridiculous with one obvious one you're meant to pick). Try to pull out your gun in a place where the programming doesn't allow for it and you'll be given a totally crap reason for your not being able to do so.

On the plus side, you do have the freedom to roam around the game's locations at will, but actually making progress generally involves finding the next 'thing' that needs to be done.

Happily, my fault-finding didn't get much further. I was suitably impressed by the graphics (a vast improvement on standard Sierra fare) and engrossed by the puzzles, and delighted to find that Alt-M switches off the music.

It's not quite a first-rate cinemathingumy game, but is definitely up there with the best of the second rate ones. Whether you think it's worth spending all that money on, however, is entirely up to you.

Uppers: Good graphics, plenty of atmosphere, 'intelligent' characters, 85 detail-packed locations and a fair amount of suitably absorbing gameplay.

Downers: A bit limiting on what you can actually do, which is a major flaw in a game of this size. Startlingly unoriginal. Oh, and the hard diskless should forget it!

If you're looking for a fresh, innovative graphic adventure, one with a twist, you'd better look elsewhere. But if you just want something big, solid and dependable to get your teeth into, and aren't too worried by the likelihood of having seen it all before, this would probably do fine.