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You've got to hand it to Ariolasoft - they really know how to make strange games. Look at their track record: Mail Order Monsters, Archon, Racing Destruction Set, Scarabaeus, etc, etc. It should come as no surprise, then, to learn that Triaxos is the usual Ariolasoft mix of original ideas and peculiar gameplay.

The storyline goes something like this: "deep in space floats a high security prison containing the only man capable of activating the most powerful weapon in the galaxy. Your mission Jim, should you decide to accept it, is to rescue this man and return him to your ship in only thirty minutes. Good luck. This hype will self-destruct in five seconds." Oh, and just to add to the amusements, a mind-probe lands on the prison ten minutes after you, with the sole intention of zapping the prisoner's brains.

The prison is a 64 room cube, 4 x 4 x 4, guarded by the usual psychopathic robots armed with lasers (who gives killer robots their weapons in all these games? - whoever he is, he should be tracked down and locked up for a very long time). Your hero is armed with a laser, which has limited energy, and some explosives. He can take a fair old bit of damage and seems to heal himself slowly but surely.

Now to the actual game - you run round the prison killing robots, looking for the prisoner, and generally trying to stay alive. If you find the prisoner he then follows you around from that moment on, until you make your escape. So far, so normal; the clever bit comes with devices called Face-Lifts: these shift you from wall to wall, making what was the floor into a wall, and a door into a hole in the floor. (In fact you can only stand on three different walls, as the view of each room is 3D cutaway).

At this point the explosives come into their own. The trick is to place them on the floor where you think there may be a covered hole (there are a lot of these), hopefully blow a hole there, then jump onto a different wall so that the hole is now a door, which you can walk through. If you so wish you can risk jumping through the hole, but if you fall through two holes, one underneath the other, you will die. Note here that you only have one life.

All this cavorting around with holes and explosives may lead you to forget your mission, but there are other important objectives too, such as collecting the for parts of the probe laser, a weapon to destroy the mindprobe, and a Jet-Pack needed to get you and the prisoner back to your ship.

You can also make a clone of yourself at the clone-booth, or get your gun recharged at an energy tower while you're thinking about all this.

It may have occurred to you that given that this is only a half-four game (the time limit runs in real time) an dthat there are only 64 rooms, it must be (a) quite small, and (b) fairly easy. Neither assumption is true. The game is in fact very large, as each room can be viewed in three different perspectives, and is very taxing on the cerebral matter (brain to you) as tactical placing of holes, and the progress through them, becomes very important the further into the game you get.

Having credited the game thus far, it must be said that it has a few foibles; its graphics consist of big, blocky sprites with not-so-good animation, boring room graphics and little that's actually exciting. The joystick control is slightly awkward, reminiscent of the early Hexpert conversions in its original diagonal style (i.e. up moves your character diagonally left and up the screen), and the sound is nothing to write home about.

These criticisms show what a strange little game this is, being the complete opposite of most new releases: plenty of originality, but very few flash effects - just pure game. Slightly overpriced I feel.