Let's do everyone a favour and be brief with this one. If you take everything said in the King's Bounty review in these pages and negate it, then you'll have a handy thumbnail guide to Secret Of The Silver Blades.

After an hour spent ploughing through the manual and the interminable start-up sequence, I was no nearer to understanding the first thing about this game. When I eventually got into it, my effort was rewarded with endless hours (or it could have been days) trekking around the most tediously featureless landscape imaginable in desperate search of anything which could vaguely be described as action.

Quite some time later I found an interesting-looking doorway and entered it... to find myself back where I'd just come from!

After another couple of weeks of traipsing about, I managed to find some other characters. Entering into battle I picked my way through the unwieldy control system and completely failed to have any fun whatsoever. Later I did some more event-free traipsing, cried a bit from boredom that was almost physically tangible, and went home.

I'm sorry if any D&D fanatics out there think I haven't spent nearly enough time playing this game, but it's my life and it's too short to waste any more of it on unadulterated rubbish like this. Actually, that's a lie. I'm not sorry at all.

Exactly the kind of crap that the likes of King's Bounty will hopefully put an end to. 'Tedious' just doesn't even begin to cover it.