Mega CD Dune is basically the same game as the one which appeared on the Amiga about a year-and-a-half ago. Aesthetically, though, it's more like the more recent and considerably sexier PC version, and boasts meaty chunks of Full Motion Video, speech and CD-type music to pretty things along a bit. It's basically a simple adventure game with pretensions to strategy, which plays like an interactive movie and looks like Benny Hill. (What? - Ed) You play Paul Atreides, son of a wealthy and powerful royal family, and you've been sent to the dusty sand planet Arrakis (more commonly known as Dune, because it's basically one great big one) to mine Spice, a fantastic and powerful narcotic drug which can't be found anywhere else in the Universe. To do this, you have to befriend the indigenous population of the planet (the Fremen) and deploy them as miners and soldiers to enable you to mine more Spice than your competitor and enemy, Baron Harkonnen. (That's enough plot. What's all this about Benny Hill? - Ed)

So far so groovy, then. Being based on a film, Dune's obviously got a great deal of plot depth already built-in to it, which makes a nice change from 'The princess has been kidnapped by fluffy woodland creatures and you've got to travel through six worlds of garishly-coloured platforms to rescue her', at least. But Mega CD Dune also seems to have brought some rather less welcome baggage with it from its cinematic beginnings, and that's a film-like game structure. In any one situation in the game, there are very rarely more than a couple of different things you can do. You're forced through Dune in an extremely linear manner, talking to one character who then tells you to go and talk to another character, who then sends you off on a mission to recruit another character, and so on.

By the time you actually have to make any kind of meaningful decisions, you'll have been playing the game for well over an hour, your eyes will hurt from trying to make out the tiny text that all the dialogue's displayed in (thank heavens for the speech which saves you from the bother of squinting, but listening instead of reading does entail a lot of sitting around waiting for the characters to finish delivering their sentences in a variety of measured, portentous voices) and if you're as short of attention span as many console owners seem to be these days, you'll be going 'Why isn't there anything to shoot?' and wandering off for a game of Gunstar Heroes or something brilliant like that. Still, I'm all for encouraging games that need a bit of brainpower, so I'm not going to count a slow start as a major flaw.

What I AM going to count as a major flaw, though, is that it never really gets very much more involved that that. Sure, as the game progresses there's a bit more happening, as your troops get involved in battles with Baron Harkonnen's forces, you develop spooky psychic powers and the Emperor (your ultimate boss) starts to get all stroppy with you for not delivering enough Spice, but through it all there's still an unseen hand guiding you along like a lollipop lady taking a five-year-old child across a busy road. In fact, you get so used to having the game spoon-feed you that when your interaction with a character does leave you without a blindingly obvious next move that even Benny Hill could spot (It's probably not worth me asking, is it? - Ed), you find yourself beginning to panic and get a bit sulky at having been left just hanging there and, horror of horrors, having to think for yourself for once.

What we've got here, then, is an experience that's gently entrancing for a little while (and the soothing, leisurely atmosphere is something that's carried in almost everything about the game, not just the slow pace - there's a kind of delicate elegance about the graphics, the sound, the colouring, even right down to the bird-like grace of the helicopter thing you fly between locations in), but after a couple of hours you begin to get fed up of feeling relaxed and mellow and start to wish something would bloody well happen for your 40 quid. Watching your ornithopter reel and glide across gorgeous fully-rendered sand dunes and through dramatic rocky canyons to the accompaniment of gently undulating (if somewhat hissy, to be frank) music is all very nice, but it's not great compensation for having nothing much to do for most of the time. At the end of the day, while Dune is a charming way to spend somebody else's money (Benny Hill's, for example), this kind of simplistic gameplay dressed up with digitised film footage and three days' worth of crisp speech samples is about a year out of date for even the least sophisticated Mega CD gamer.

Well, it's got a lot of atmosphere, but there really isn't a great deal of gameplay in here. Interactive movies? I'd rather just watch a real one, thanks.

At least there's no sign of Sting, though.

73 PERCENT

1. Castles
Not very good castles, though. No sooner do you get your enormous imperial army installed, than the tide comes in and you're completely scuppered. Pah.

2. Glass
If you set fire to it at extremely high temperatures and blow into it, or something like that. Dangerous stuff anyway, always breaking and cutting you. What's wrong with good old perspex?

3. Spice
But only in science-fiction movies.

4. Um...

5. Sand - it's not a lot of use, really, is it?