It's funny, but every strategy game set in the future seems to have one thing in common. Some years before the action starts, there is always a Great War. These Great Wars always kill everybody bar the main protagonists, and blow away the galaxy.

Maelstrom does not disappoint. Many years ago, there was a Great War - civilisation was given a severe pasting, and some bright race took it upon itself to create a huge empire by not entirely fair means.
These chaps are called the Syndicate, and you are a fully paid up member until you decide you don't like seeing poor but happy people colonised and killed.

You last mission of the bad folk was to check out planet Harmony, but you defect and become Overlord. Your task is to protect Harmony and stop the Syndicate overruning the galaxy.

Despite Harmony's vulnerability, there are huge resources to hand (you could even afford to sign Roberto Baggio, but he probably wouldn't be very good at war) so with careful research and development, and some bad-assed no-nonsense violence you must set about re-balancing the power-base in favour of the little guy.

Get a grip on the galaxy
Actually, it's a bit more complex than that. There is a huge cast of characters with a whole range of personalities and you've got to assign personnel to tasks best suited to them. To fund operations you must generate finance by selling Harmony products (the hairspray goes down a bomb) and mining.

There are also wider issues to be considered such as the Syndicate's grip on the rest of the galaxy. Phew. Got time for a nice cup of tea?

Writer Syd Mead is not known for his cute platform affairs, and Maelstrom is one mother-ship of a game. Every decision you make has a knock-on effect and if you can't keep the folk back on Harmony, er, harmonious, then you won't last long.

The icons are simple enough to follow and Maelstrom is well set out. Bradley as Overlord didn't last too long on his first few attempts, but perseverance brings reward. The animated sequences work well and those with a penchant for strategy should find plenty to go at in Maelstrom.

The plot of Maelstrom reads like a tired old synthesis of Dune, Star Wars and Lord of the Rings. You know the kind of thing; there were frightful galaxy-wide wars in the past, people speak about them in hushed tones they were so terrible, yawn; the planet you've become Overlord of is basically just a huge slab of the most important mineral/rocket fuel (spice anyone?) in the galaxy, zzzzz; a big bad kick-ass-out-of-the-small-guys evil empire is swallowing up the free planets and putting them under its ghastly thrall, snoresville Arizona.

You were originally an agent for the Empire, on a reconnaissance mission to find out the best method of conquering the planet. Suddenly, in an Arnie Schwarzenegger Running Man change of heart, you switch your loyalties and decide to help out the inhabitants of Harmony (the fuel-laden planet that sounds like a hairspray).

Naturally enough, as planets under imminent threat of takeover tend to do, they appoint you, the turncoat enemy, as Overlord of the whole place. And that's where the game begins.

THE ECONOMIST
You sit at an Executron 1200 fully automated holo-desk. It is your interface with the cabinet of five, who run the most important facets of Harmonious life, namely: military, mining, research and development, secret intelligence networks and all the rest.

At first the control panels and method of interfacing with them (clicky point click click) seems like walking through a heavy fog while wearing badly misted-up glasses. Eventually though, through the blindness of confusion, tunnel vision, endless messages and a million different buttons to press, the gestalt falls into place (the completeness of wholeness of the game takes form).

Many of your decisions depend on the quality of the communications you receive. It is worthwhile taking note of what is happening and relating it to the bigger picture. Basically, you're a budget juggler, personnel hirer and firer, secret agent and military commander all in one.

Your income can come from many sources, the primary area, naturally enough, is mining (basic spaceship fuel component). From the mining panel you can survey areas, set up mines, and predict, or even work out, what your future budgets are going to be and plan accordingly.

As in real life, the quality of the work being done depends on the number of staff you have and the ability of your managers. Which is why the hiring and firing (personnel) panel is so important. It's worth checking out who's available at any one time; the perfect replacement for someone lacking in effectiveness may pop up at just the right moment.

Because of the large number of personnel you have to deal with, it can get to be a pain ensuring that you've got the most efficient teams for the job and constantly monitoring them.
You can get away with inefficient teams but you won't earn as high a profit in return as is possible. It can mean the difference between having enough of a space fleet to repel the invaders or becoming yet another notch in the big bad empire's belt. And that brings us on to the military.

GUNS & AMMO
The military section is probably the most interesting of the lot. From here, you get to build spaceships. Ships consist of a hull, weapons systems, defence systems and computer systems. Each hull has limited sots for each type of system; a Fox stealth ship only has space for one weapon, three defence and one computer system, whereas a Dragon mother ship hold up to five weapon, five defence and three computer systems.

You have complete freedom to choose the systems you want to equip the hull with. It has to be admitted that system choice stimulates the imagination. Again, making sure that you've got the proper personnel is important. There's no point in handing over a state of the art battleship to rookies fresh out of college.

Your ships can be sent out on various missions of peace, reconnaissance and out and out skullduggery. And talking of skullduggery brings us neatly on to the Secret Intelligence Network panel.

The head of this section looks like Yul Brynner with biker shades on. He don't take no crap and he's willing to kick butt whether it be on his home planet or on other systems. Of all your budgets, this area is the one that is most likely to pay dividends. You can destabilise other planetary governments and safeguard your own.

NEW SCIENTIST
There's no easy link from the last panel to the Research and Development panel other than it is no less important than any of the other panels. Breakthroughs in weapons, mining defence and computer technology can be made here. Anything good can earn you revenue or give your spaceships the edge if you choose to arm them with your new discoveries.

So there it is. I've hardly scratched the index of possibilities that exist with this game. I'm aware that much of the review has been a description rather than a criticism but due to the size of the thing, I couldn't really think of a better way to do it. It comes on six disks and is hard drive installable. It would be a real pain to play on a floppy based Amiga. Even with the hard drive some of the wait times are plain irritating.

Maelstrom has lots of budgets to be balanced, wages to be paid, credits and deficits to be audited, strategies against competitors to be thought out and implemented etc. Not everybody's idea of fun admittedly, but if you're a chartered or registered accountant, an RPG player, someone who loves football management games or just someone who misses the yuppie days of the eighties, buy this now.

If you're a normal human being with a daytime occupation and a life and have got a spare eight hours to kill every day of your life then give it a try, you might like it, Then again you might not.

I don't know, all this talk of peace and disarmament, when you never quite know what's out there. Take the peaceful people of the planet Harmony in Maelstrom, for example. They had no weapons, long hair and preached peace and love. Then aliens invaded, destroyed everyone who tried to reason with them and subjugated the rest.

Without a clue of how to run a proper war and with passive resistance failing at every attempt, they call you in to work for their biggest corporation and to raise an army capable of freeing the planet - setting the scene for a high-tech interstellar wargame with you as the key player.

I AM THE MASTER!
Any game where I get to be called Overlord and have a pretty PA is fine by me. All I was lacking were some grovelling subjects and peeled grapes. Even without, I was perfectly happy to wreak death and destruction on the forces of evil.

Unfortunately, bureaucracy is the factor which dominates this game. Basically the brief is - you want a war? You pay for it! Also, seeing that Harmony's sole income is from mining, you'll need to don your hard hat, grab your canary and head for the pits. The more your mines produce, the more dosh you have to spend on building armies. The mining section is similar in lots of ways to Virgin's Dune 2, although in this case it's very dull. There must be a more interesting way to limit the amount of money you spend on forces.

To start with, your army is weak and entering a battle is liable to earn you a scudding. However, a quick call to the research and development department followed by several large payments will lead to better weapons. Building your forces is your first task.

With only limited cash it's hard to decide whether to spend your money on ground forces, or build up a sizeable aircraft squadron. This bit is actually more absorbing than battles themselves, as you're never sure if you've got the right combinations until they've been slaughtered or return in one piece from the battle.

More important than any weapon is your phone book. Your video-phone is the most important bit of kit you possess. From the safety of your office you have to deal with government officials, scientists and soldiers. With this phone you can keep track of what's going on in the world, what your bosses think of you and any news which might give you a tactical advantage.

I would advise you to install this game on a hard disk, unless you're very patient. It comes on six disks and has loads of annoying swops which interrupt the action with irritating frequency. Extra memory would probably remedy some of the problem, but I wouldn't be so inclined to play this game without a hard disk.

DODGY GRAPHICS?
Like most wargames, the graphics are extremely poor. Most of the time you're looking at dull text read-outs, punctuated by the occasional animated piccy of the person at the other end of the phone line. A bit more could have been done with the user interface, all the screens are accessed via a row of tiny boxes right at the bottom of the screen. Several times I accidentally clicked on the wrong thing to be faced with a multitude of disk swops before I got to where I wanted to go.

There's enough here to please ardent strategy buffs, which basically means this isn't the sort of game you can have a quick go on. I prefer Dune 2 mainly because it's more polished and far easier to get into. If you're the sort of person whose strategy game tolerance limit stretches as far as Powermonger, then this isn't a game for you.