The only complimentary thing I can think of to say about this one is "nice idea". You're presented with an unexplored, virgin world, and orders from the king to colonise it. Other players are trying to do the same, and conflict is inevitable.

Sounds like fun? Well, it's not. It's crap. Look at the screenshot: on the left is a blocky, indecipherable wargame-style map, and on the right is a list of letters and numbers. In a nutshell, that's the game.

Instructions are issued by fumbling through a series of chronically disorganised menus. There's no clear way of knowing what you can click on and what you can't, and a simple operation like moving around involves descending through two levels of menus before being able to click on the square you want to move to. What's the point? Why couldn't I just click on it to start off with? And I do wish it would stop throwing numbers at me. If I wanted to know many men, coins, action points (etc) a certain general had I'd tell it so. I don't want it all displayed on-screen the whole time the space could be used for sorting out menus.

What we've got, basically, is a run of the mill god-sim that lacks a nice 3D graphical front end, leaving the horrendously mathematical innards exposed for all to see. The manual informs us, for example, that ships sail at '(wind velocity + 1) x sail x rigging'. I don't wish to know that.

Even if you don't mind all that sort of thing, and are happy to reject years of graphics advancement for the sake of squeezing in as many numbers and equations as possible, the fact remains that it's boring - extremely boring - and I'm never going to play it again. Ever.

Yuck. An unplayable muddle of numbers. Not even the good(ish) sound effects can hope to save it.