Exile has been groomed as the successor to Elite. Superior are even claiming it is better than Elite. These are bold claims for anyone to make. Perhaps it doesn't matter whether it is or it isn't. You might not have played Elite in the first place.

It has been priced at the highest level so it better be good to justify it with the quantity and quality of cheaper games around at the moment. Here is my opinion of the BBC version...

The Story. The planet Phoebus has been taken over by an exiled, evil genetic engineer named Triax. He has built a cave system with eccentric robots, strange mutated creatures and so on. A previous mission has failed and debris from that mission can be found. Your job is to find Triax and do away with him.

The Game. As soon as I started the game I was impressed by the sheer quality of the graphics and the animation. The screen is a bit small on the standard version and it judders on scrolling but this does not take away from the striking quality of the game.

The game can only be described as an arcade adventure as you see a profile view of your man who has to travel around a large cut-away landscape. There are many hazards and creatures that you will meet and they are, without doubt, the most realistic I have ever seen in a game of this type.

You can walk, jump, use your jetpack, lie down, hold things, pocket things and more.

There is a very good helping of blasting which adds a great deal to the game. You can shoot at any angle and there are various weapons to obtain which are of varying strength. You can also throw grenades and indeed any other object that you find.

There are no end of features to the game that I could go into but it is the overall product that is important rather than any of these.

Certainly the game is huge and very detailed. Perhaps the best thing to do is to compare it with a game which I hope you will have seen and that is Citadel.

Exile is bigger than Citadel. It is more detailed, the sound effects are undoubtedly better and so are the puzzles. The animation is 672% better for the main character and rather than the bouncing shapes or ghosts that make a beeline for you, Exile boasts incredibly realistic animated creatures that have true behaviour patterns and characteristics.

Overall it is an excellent game. I would prefer some on-screen information (e.g. a score, etc) and I wish in some ways Elite had been left out of the marketing as I don't believe the two games are in any way comparable. Exile is quite definitely the best arcade adventure ever produced by a long, long way. But it is an arcade adventure and not a contender for the Elite title in my opinion. Elite was totally original whereas Exile is a huge leap forward on an established game format.

I'm sure you will find that it is a superb game which takes some beating and it is more essential than a disc drive to arcade adventure fans.

The ratings given are for the BBC version only. At the time of going to print we still haven't seen the Electron version.