Imagine a time in the not-too-distant future. Industrial waste output in American cities reaches an all time high causing massive pollution problems. One example of the kind of problem facing the environment is the San Francisco smog.

One day, the morning fog rolled in from the bay and mixed with the toxic chemicals in the atmosphere to form a dense layer of mist covering the city. Slowly the citizens found themselves choking on the poisonous gas. People began to die of asphyxiation, causing many to leave the lower levels and move up to the tops of skyscrapers.

Once the streets were deserted, thugs and criminals began to group together, forming the evil and dangerous Black Angel gang. Day by day their reign of terror spread across the city. The legacy of the Killing Cloud has begun.

Let's be careful out there
You play the part of a police biker in the San Francisco Police Department. Law enforcement has changed a lot since Dirty Harry toted his Magnum .44 and invited punks to make his days. Riding across the cityscape in a Police Hoverbike - a cross between a police car and a helicopter - your task is to chase and capture members of the Black Angels.

The game begins in the briefing room of one of the SFPD's police precincts, where you are given your assignment for the day. Once you know where you are going, you can access the city map and place back-up units on the streets.

Villains must be apprehended by first capturing them in nets and then by stepping out to arrest them. There is a kind of self-piloted paddy wagon called a PUP will then swoop in to pick up the crim and take him back to the station house.

Once you've set up your mission, it's off to the armoury to kit yourself out for the mission. Here you can arm yourself with machine-guns and cannons, add an extra fuel-tank to your bike and equip yourself with a life-support suit to protect yourself from that deadly 'killing' cloud.

Bear in the air
When you're fully tooled-up, a nicely animated launch sequence appears and then it's on to the 3D flying sequence. Using your radar to spot your backup units, you can zoom down to the scene of the crime and net your suspect. Many of the gang members have accomplices that fly around making your life difficult by shooting at you, so you need to keep a careful watch!

Once the PUP has docked and you've returned to the station, you must interrogate the suspect to glean information on the Black Angels' activities. Unfortunately, the suspects have a good lawyer and some pretty hefty plea-bargaining is required to get the answers you need.

If you get the bargaining right, the the prisoner will break down and confess everything he knows, allowing you to continue the investigation. If you get it wrong he walks.

I'm a motorcycle rider
To begin with The Killing Cloud is laden with a futuristic, oppressive atmosphere which promises a great deal, and once into the 3D flying and battling section the game gets quite exciting. However there are times when the game progresses in a wildly illogical fashion. The interrogation sequence is one of the more frustrating sections, since you are told that the prisoner can trad eyears off his sentence for information.

The answers, however, are triggered by offering a certain reduction in one go, so that if you don't offer enough on a particular go, you get no info and their sentence is reduced anyway! Also, what happens to the missiles on your ship and the PUPs that return home? They vanish, that's what!

Blimey! The inhabitants of the once great (and not at all weird and freaksome) city of San Francisco had better not even bother getting out of bed tomorrow morning. Why's this? Well, according to the scenario for The Killing Cloud, good old SF will be slimed by a toxic fog before New Year's Day 1997.

The reason for the arrival of the fog, or, as it is more affectionately know, the 'Killing Cloud', is swathed in myth, in legend, Green politics and poisonous rumour. It may well have been caused by the vile, crusty, rotten way in which we treat the planet, or person or persons unknown may have whipped it up to start a major crime wave and get rid of all the Californian hippies. Who knows?

Actually, apart from getting in the way and making life difficult, the cloud plays little part in what you have to do during the game. In fact the whole thing should really have been called something like The Dirty Low Down Black Angels Get Tough and, erm, There's This Toxic Stuff Too, but the name would have been far too long to fit on the packaging.

A FIVE COURSE MEAL
The Killing Cloud has this habit of not actually doing what you think it's going to do. Visually, it's a delicious five course meal with coffee. All 3D filled vector graphics offering dizzying flying sequences, altitude perspectives, and a real feeling of danger in the majority of the ten scenarios. Howa torture scene included in the game until Amnesty International objected, and it was cutever, and that's 'However' with a capital H, it is also riddled with some frustrating inconsistencies.

Try this one out for a starter. Your main task in life, as a hi-techn San Francisco cop, is to catch members of the Black Angels gang. You are not allowed to kill the beggars unless they shoot first - in fact you have to catch them in order to interrogate them. That, as any torturer worth his or her salt will tell you, means getting them alive. (To digress for a moment, there was in fact a torture scene included in the game until Amnesty International objected, and it was cut. End of digression). You achieve the capture by way of nets - for a fuller explanation see the box over there on the bottom.

Now, instead of carrying these nets with you in your XB500 hoverbike, you have to leave them scattered about the city, and here's the rub - you have to do the scattering before going on the mission. Why? Why oh why, if you're so damned technologically advanced, do you have to do this? Why isn't there a tiny area of the bike in which to store the net? (For instance).

It's stupid. Maybe a few more scenarios and no net collecting would have added to the buzz of what is potentially a superb game.

Still, one positive side about the nets, or Nets as they are known to the SFPD is what you can use them as landmarks via your on-board radar. You have to do this because some stupid

hoverbike designer forgot to provide an ob-board map. If you don't know your North Beach from your Nob Hill, and find yourself flying around the city with diminishing fuel (in the vague hope that you might be headed in the right direction), they might actually turn out to be your only chance to get home!

Whinging aside, there are thrills to be had, and even a little brain athletics to indulge in, before you finish The Killing Cloud. It is far from being a plain shoot-'em-up. In fact it's rather difficult to categorise. On the one hand you have some wonderfully animated chase and fifth scenes - rapid seat-of-your-pants flying with little time to think and massive calls on your skill as a pilot.

On the other hand, there is strategy, nerve-end jangling tension, and a neat interrogation-cum-plea bargaining scene. If there wasn't such a genre as the shoot-chase-catch-talk-'em-up' before, there is now.

A COMPUTERISED B-MOVIE
While playing it I kept finding myself wishing someone had made a film out of it first. If only some decent script writers had got hold of the plot and said: 'See here guys, this just doesn't make sense. Why can't you do so-and-so? What possible reason can you have for such and such?'

An example, once you've been in the briefing room and placed your nets you go into the armoury to chose your weapons. Perhaps some explosive tipped MG ammo and some armour piercing shells would be a good idea? Or maybe you'd be better off taking a GEP MkIV armour suit? Hang on, let's go back through the door to the briefing room to check that out the mission again before we decide. What? We can't?

No, all we can do is to launch off on our hoverbike into the mission proper, quite possibly sure in the knowledge that we've cocked it all up from the outset by not having put the nets in the right places, by having taken the wrong equipment with you and so on. There's no possible internal game logic for it to deny you the right to prepare yourself properly before you set off. How very unnecessary, and how very, very annoying.

A BOX-OFFICE FLOP?
The Killing Cloud really is like one of those movies which has superb special effects, excellent ideas, great sequences and a half-blind mule of a plot. It's like Batteries Not Included or The Black Hole, or hundreds of others we could both probably mention. A good script writer would have knocked some sense into it for sure, but a better special effects set-up would be hard to find.

But there I go, griping again. In many ways it feels rather churlish of me to complain too much - after all, it's all too apparent that the plot writer(s) did intend to create a solid, believable and atmospheric world in which to play out your role. The action is fast and furious. The feel of the whole venture smacks of quality and thought. It's just a shame that the occasional illogicality lets it down.