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I have to say I was looking forward to this! I play (real) rugby anyway, and had found Domark's Rugby: The World Cup a delight, so the chance to enact another classic England/Scotland clash, this time with a different computer game, was one I couldn't miss. With the Amiga as the Jock coach, and me in charge of the Sassenachs, our match was to be a league game in the snow with a strong wind, equal skills and both offside and knock on rules applying.

It started off well too. Graphically the game is very pleasing to the eye, with clearly defined, well animated players, and some good effects including five different versions of the action replay which vary in both speed and dimension. It gives you plenty of options too - you can choose the weather conditions for your match, change the squad in your team, change their strip, play different skill levels, vary the time of match duration, control the pitch conditions, apply different rules of play and select the type of match (from World Cup, friendly or league games).

If you do win the ball at a line out or scrum (this is done by furiously waggling the joystick back and forth) you're given a selection of interesting but surprisingly technical moves (selected by moving the joystick up or down in the direction of the move indicated on the screen and clicking the fire button) to take advantage of. These are generally quite impressive when executed - if you can follow the direction of play - but will, I think, prove less accessible to most players than the controls of Domark's effort. Indeed, the whole approach here is of a more technically correct, less immediately playable, and generally more specialised tacticians game.

World Class Rugby suffers from some controllability problems too - tackling, for instance, is generally a very hit and miss affair, which can prove frustrating. When in a defending situation you may find that, although your players are close enough to tackle the opposition they are not allowed to do so - an arrow supposedly indicates which of your players can tackle, but in many cases I found this to be someone completely out of range, while other, closer, players had to hang around helplessly. It got even worse when the ball was bouncing free into my half and the game prevented me from picking it up, even though I had plenty of defenders just standing by waiting for the chance. Too many times the computer player scored certain tries this way, while I could do little but sit and watch.

This would be unfriendly and unplayable at the best of times, but coming so soon after Domark's Rugby: The World Cup compounds the feeling. As I've been playing this, the highly tactical bias of the games - they're not free form in the slightest - has increasingly reminded me of American Football, not rugby, and indeed Audiogenic's Peter Calver has confirmed, "we tried to make World Class Rugby the rugby equivalent of John Madden American Football." Now John Madden's isn't a technically overburdened game, but you can see the sort of thinking that's led to the game we see here. There are people who will enjoy this version - don't get me wrong - but for the vast majority of us it's got to be Domark's version every time.

Disappointing for anyone but serious sports tacticians. World Class Rugby has its virtues, but playability and accessibility aren't two of them. My advice - go for Domark's Kick Off-alike instead.