This is the follow up to Psygnosis' tale of time travel and vengeance. You have captured your father's killer, and now is the moment to pop back to 1922 and the family - so long as you can find the right ore to fuel the flight to the correct place in time.

There were some highly obscure problems in Chronoquest 1. But, sad to say, there is precious little subtlety in the sequel.

This makes gameplay a doodle, although that does not mean it is easy to finish the game; play is more a matter of carrying out a set of actions and hitting on the right combination. A lot of luck and a little logic is necessary to progress, but the logic is French and when the luck runs out it is back to the beginning again to try things in a different order. A saved position will help, but it is not really a useful option unless you have a whole pack of spare disks to dedicate to the game, since only one file can be saved per disk - subsequent saves simply overwrite.

The main action comes from confrontation with the principal characters to whom you are able to speak, at which point the TALK, LISTEN and GIVE icons are automatically displayed. The player's side of a conversation is limited to a choice of two lines, and the response is displayed in text accompanied by digitised speech. There is an option for turning the speech synthesis off, which avoids a couple of extra disk swaps and saves the player a number of winces.

Which brings me to the worst aspect of the game - the shoddy conversion of the game from French to English. A frequent response message: 'But what he did says' - meaningless crap. A USE cursor which asks you what you want to use and then where you want to use it by displaying the words 'quoi' and 'ou'.

Chronoquest II is an improvement on its forerunner, but lacks the depth and logic of a serious adventure, and it lacks humour, except the unintentional variety. However, it is slick to play, and interesting enough to keep the attention of the player.

Remember all the fun you had with Chronoquest some two years ago, clicking your magnifying glass on every single pixel on every single screen just in case you missed examining something vital to the completion of the adventure? Well, it's pixel-clicking time again with the release of the (well overdue) Chronoquest II.

After the fun and frolics you've had travelling through a spatio-temporal universe in your dad's time machine (Explora), all you want to do now is to get some kip. Unfortunately, as you attempt to travel back to your own time, a disorder in the temporal turbines of Explora disturbs the teleportation phase and you're catapulted to an era not of your choosing.

In fact, you end up on the deck of a ship. Explora is with you and her reactor is devoid of a necessary metal to fuel her, making her unable to take you anywhere. You soon realise your task is to find sufficient metal to enable a safe passage back to your own time.

You can only go one way from the ship's deck and that is to the shore. But a bit of beachcombing soon reveals an anchor (the things these sailors leave behind) which looks like yummy food for a hungry time machine. Unfortunately (again), the anchor is only sufficient to take you so far forward in time... the plot thickens.

Chronoquest II is fully icon driven and is claimed to be user-friendly... it is. All actions involve pointing and clicking which, until you begin to progress in the game, gets a little tedious. However, once you get into the swing of things the game's technicalities become secondary to the well though-out plot.

The screen basically comprises two windows: a large upper window displays location graphics while the lower one feature action icons and text messages. Icons include get, drop, give, examine and listen - vocal synthesis of non-player characters is featured but may be turned off to reduce disk swapping - advance and retreat.

Graphics are excellent, especially the full-screen pictures which herald different time zones, rendering barely adequate FX and music dull by comparison.

There are one or two oddities such as the inclusion of an object described as 'a anchor' and the reply 'But what did he say' when you try an incorrect action. And it's a good job text accompanies the vocal synthesis of characters 'cause they're difficult to understand at times, especially the Musketeers.

During my first half hour with Chronoquest II I have to admit I had my doubts, it all seemed very odd and I managed to get nowhere very quickly. But slowly (I'm not the man I was) pennies dropped and the game opened out to show itself to be at least as good as its predecessor.