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On the box of this game there's a quote which says "Rocket Ranger is... a real landmark in Amiga Software history", and for once they're right. When it first came out, Rocket Ranger featured (probably) the most stunning graphics ever seen on any home computer, and digitised music that gave the game a feel befitting the name of the company that produced it, Cinemaware.

This was a piece of software that wasn't so much a game, more of an interactive movie (a term which has since become so overused as to be meaningless). But wait. Look back at that sentence. "Wasn't so much a game..." Doesn't that sound a bit wrong to you, isn't "a game" exactly what it's supposed to be? And therein lies the problem with Rocket Ranger.

On the surface it's absolutely gorgeous, but inside it's a gameplay-free zone. The sub-games which make it up are all pretty dire in their own right, despite the lovely graphics, and any simple fun that might have been had from it goes out of the window when you're confronted with half-a-dozen disk swaps every ten minutes!

Some people love it - our own Gary Penn seems to think it's the bee's knees, for example - but I can't for the life of me see why. It's not all bad; if you've got a monumental degree of persistence you'll find a fair old strategy game in there, but frankly this is best bought as a piece of history, and of course to reain something's value as a relic, it's best if you don't ever take it out of the box...

Rocket Ranger is nice to have, but not something you'd be in a hurry to spend a tenner on.