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I hate this 'SimEarth' business. So for the remainer of the review it's going to be 'Sim Earth', okay? Either that or start calling myself JonathanDavies, and that would look very silly.

The background: Sim City was a great great game that just about everybody liked. Sim Earth is the sequel to Sim City. It's been knocking around on the PC for ages, and its arrival on the Amiga has been dreaded for some time. Er, 'dreaded'? Surely 'looked forward to'? Unfortunately not. Nobody really liked the game on the PC for reasons which will subsequently become clear, and Maxis aren't renowned for listening to their critics. Their timing also seems to be a little out - a year or so ago they might have sold quite a few Sim Earths to enthusiastic Sim City players. But the memory of Sim City is fading fast, and people are going to look at the new game afresh. (There was also Sim Ant - nuff said.)

The game: Sim City simulated a city. Sim Earth, predictably enough, simulates the whole Earth. The whole flipping thing, from microbes to continents. The object of the game is to try to evolve and maintain a sentient species.

Quite a tall order. Luckily the game provides everything you'll need: several billion tonnes of rock, equipment to generate air and oceans around it, and as many living organisms as you can find space for. It'll also take care of the horrendous number of calculations generated when this lot gets mixed together. All you've got to do is juggle everything around to create the optimum conditions for evolution to take place.

This all sounded fair enough, so I popped in the disk, switched on and... oh dear.

I, along with just about everyone else around here, am constantly bemoaning the way that strategy-based games consider themselves exempt from the basic rule that other games take for granted - namely, if a game wants to be taken seriously it ought to look the part.

Is Sim Earth any different? Er, no. The single disk the game comes on boots up onto a Workbench screen, from which you have to load the actual game by opening windows and clicking on icons. Not a good start. Then, other than a couple of reasonably presentable introductory screens, it's horrible Amiga pull-down menus all the way. Not only do they look tatty, but, because of the calculations that are constantly going on behind the scenes, they respond extremely erractically to your attempts to access them. The actual graphics themselves are even worse - far poorer than many a Napoleonic wargame, and with scrolling reminiscent of the Spectrum in its early days. How come people like Bullfrog manage to come up with complicated strategy games that look nice too, while Maxis seem to be stuck in the mid-fourteenth century?

It's probably just as well, then, that the standard of Sim Earth's presentation doesn't reflect the quality of the workings that lurk beneath the game's surface. That side of things seems to work fine, simulating the Earth quite nicely (I assume). The amount of work that's going on under there is, I suppose, quite astonishing, with continents sliding about, ice caps melting, volcanos erupting and species evolving in a really rather convincing manner. As a simulation of the Earth (or, indeed, Mars, Venus or any other planet), Sim Earth is spot on.

As a game, however, things aren't so rosy. Even if you can forgive Sim Earth for its gruesome graphics and clunky user interface, it simply isn't any fun to play. You set up your planet, you tweak a few variables, you trigger a few earthquakes, you dot a few species around, and that's it.

Then it's a case of sitting back and seeing what happens, and maybe tweaking a few more variables if things aren't working out. It's quite easy (and often very tempting) to go off, have tea and come back to find nothing has happened in your absence except a little continental drift. This 'tedium' problem is a fault of the much more graphically sound PC version too, so there's obviously something fundamentally wrong in there. Eco systems are boring - that's the message that comes across.

But before I pen that inevitably damning final paragraph and apply myself to the painful task of coming up with a suitably low mark for the thing, I'll try to soften the blow a little by giving a special mention to the Sim Earth's manual. It's actually very good, explaining the game's complexities in a way even I managed to understand, and providing masses in the way of background information. A thumbs up there then.

And now the part I hate. (No, I do. Sometimes I wonder whether I'm really cut out for this business.) I can see how much work has gone into the game. I can see the tears welling in Ocean's eyes when they read this.

But my verdict has to be: don't do it. If you loved Sim City (which I certainly did), this could easily seem to be the next obvious step. But there's simply no comparison. Sim City was clean, straightforward fun. The nicest thing you can say about Sim Earth is that it works. It's big, messy and absolutely no fun at all.

Uppers: It simulates a planet's ecosystem very convincingly, and might therefore prove useful as some sort of educational tool. And even if you only have one go, that'll keep you busy for several hours.

Downers: The trashy presentation would be forgivable if the game wasn't so cripplingly boring to play. It tries to offer too much, and ends up offering nothing.

Okay, I was hooked for a while to begin with. But it quickly became apparent that a planet simulator - in this form at least - is absolutely no fun at all to play. There just isn't any mileage in the idea.