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This package contains Mountains Of Ket, Temple Of Vran and The Final Mission, the three adventures forming "the classic and colossal Ket Trilogy". Often when a piece of software is given enough sales hype to sell sand to the Saudis you become a bit sceptical about the quality of the game itself.

The adventure is hardly "colossal". The Mountains Of Ket has only about 66 locations, and the complete trilogy has no more rooms than an average Epic or Robico release.

But to its credit, the game encompasses three tightly linked Sphinx/Ring Of Time type adventures which contain some excellent chaining puzzles and devious passwords.

However, where things begin to break down is in the Dungeons and Dragons style combats which seem to occur at every sixth location. These combats are supposedly based on you and your foes' Prowess, Energy and Luck factors, yet are nothing more than a rather tedious series of random number generations.

Conflict can be avoided in some instances by trading wares instead or, in the case of the Ogre, by a spot of illicit gambling. But your whole progress can be ruined by unaccounted probability.

The room descriptions are sparse and little atmosphere is created. When any does exist, it is destroyed by silly interjections, such as, when the password to a secret door in "mint" condition is "Polo". That type of humour may be at home in Terrormolinos but is totally out of place here.

The whole approach seems rather dated, with parser and text compression being extremely limited. I spent over two hours trying to empty a bottle of oil in the Dragon's lair, only to eventually discover the only wording the game understood was POUR OIL.

It is a shame that the memory taken up by the combats and fancy screen display couldn't be better utilised by creating more locations or by improving room descriptions. To see how Dungeons and Dragons could be incorporated in a text adventure Incentive need have looked no further than US Gold's superb Rebel Planet.

I don't recommend this adventure, as there are better examples of the same ilk around at much lower prices.

Pendragon