You would be forgiven for thinking that Lucasfilm's Secret of Monkey Island 2 (see Page 62) was the only adventure game that is worth playing - it's a very easy mistake for Monkey fanatics to make. Sure, its'good, but it's not the only one that's good. Virgin's new Lure of the Temptress is a slightly different attempt at adventuring, and it has a few tricks up its sleeves, as you shall see.

The plot to Lure of the Temptress is predictable fair-tale stuff, but it has a liberal dose of humour and self-parody that prevents it from taking itself too seriously. You play Diermot, an unwilling hero, who gets swept up in a plot to de-throne an evil femme-fatale (the Temptress of the game's title) and free a captive goody-two-shoes.

Needless to say, the story involves caves, dungeons, a dragon and a host of inhuman henchmen-uglies who are known as the Skorl. The resulting game is a bit like a cross between Sierra-style adventures - like King's Quest - and Lucasfilm's Secret of Monkey Island, with more interaction between secondary characters.

Everybody's an individual in their own right
Characters (which number more than 25) all have their own personal identities. They wander around from place to place under their own steam, and spend a fair amount of time interacting with each other. Characters nip into bars and have short conversations with their landlords, or trundle off down the shops and natter to the looney shopkeeper.

You, in the form of Diermot, the central character, get a chance to chat to all of them at some time or another. They've all got something to say which may help your quest, or just give you some insight into Turnvale life.

Lure of the Temptress is not quite as object-obsessive as Sierra adventures, which makes it a little more interesting. There are certain puzzles which require the use of a specific item in the standard "use banana on orang-utan" form, but for the majority of the game the stuff that you pick up on your travels is purely gossip.

Your quests, problems and information are all relayed to you by the chatter from the other characters - if you happen to bump into them and get time to talk. Consequently, you're not spending so much of your time searching for a previously-unseen object. Instead, you end up looking for people - and they could be absolutely anywhere.

Excuse me, but can we have a quick word?
When you've found someone that you want to talk to, it's pretty straightforward to begin a chinwag with them - a right-click on top of the character brings up a menu of possible openers to the conversation.

You can choose either Ask, Tell, Bribe, Talk to or Blah from the list. Once selected, successive menus let you construct a sentence. This is a more traditional method than the Lucasfilm way of giving you pre-prepared responses to choose from.

Temptress' method is far more flexible, it enables you to construct some quite bizarre requests - but as a direct result of these, the characters' responses are more limited. They're sometimes as funny as The Secret of Monkey Island conversations, but often aren't as long-lived before they start repeating.

One aspect of the Temptress system makes it far more versatile than both of the Sierra and Lucasfilm systems, and that is commanding other characters. In Temptress you can (and in some places you absolutely have to) tell some of the other characters what to do. For example, your faithful servant, Ratpouch, can be instructed to "Go to the Castle Gate and then ask the Skorl Guard for a potion and then return". Off he'll trot, and get himself into trouble for wasting the Guard's time (Ratpouch often provides you with a few laughs at his own expense, and not always because you put him up to it, which really adds to the game).

Later in the adventure, issuing orders correctly is the secret of success in a life-threatening situation or two. Hardened Sierra-philes or Lucas-ites will be scratching their heads into the small hours - until they pick up on Temptress' secret weapon.

It's the war of the Game-Worlds
Downers to this game are very few: disk-accessing is a bit on the faffy side when using single-drive Amigas (though Temptress can spot an external drive and use it, which makes things far simpler). You also can't install it on to a hard drive and thus speed the whole thing up somewhat (like you can with Sierra and Lucasfilm games).

When directly compared to Sierra and Lucasfilm games in terms of size and playing time, Temptress stands up very well indeed, especially when you consider it's come from UK developers. Compared to the number of staff that Lucasfilm and Sierra involve on their adventure projects. Revolution (who are Temptress' creators) look like a cottage industry. Nevertheless, they have produced a fine piece entertainment which has masses of potential.

Although Temptress is not quite as large as Secret of Monkey Island 2, and it's just short of the humour level, it's still a pretty big game. It takes around four hours to complete the whole thing, even if you know exactly what to do before you start. In any event, Temptress surpasses almost anything Sierra have offered, by being larger, funnier and a whole lot better drawn.

Revolution, a British based development team, have come up with one of the finest adventure games yet, proving that not all 'big' adventure releases come from the other side of the Atlantic. Make no mistake - Lure of the Temptress is a very welcome addition to this American-dominated genre, coming across as a sort between Sierra's King's Quest and Lucasfilm's Monkey Island 2 (also reviewed this issue), it seems appropriate to compare the two. Lure of the Temptress definitely has a good deal less humour than Monkey Island 2 - it'd be a brave man who tried to beat Lucasfilm at that game, after all - but more than makes up for it in other areas. So how does this more subtlety flavoured Brit weigh up to its American counterpart?

The scenario first: you are Diermot, an unenthusiastic hero who finds himself the prisoner of the evil Selena, the Temptress from which the game takes its name. She's taken over the town of Turnvale with her hordes of creepy meathead mutants, the Skorl, and to start with you're in no position to stop her.

You begin the adventure trapped in a cell, you see, deep inside the dungeons and torture chambers of the evil femme's pad. Your first task, then, is obviously to escape to the town, where you can start to do some good, the ultimate aim of the game being to dethrone the evil temptress and rescue the innocent young girl called Goewin, who's been imprisoned by the nasty Skorl.

The essence of Temptress is its character interaction. Indeed, Temptress has a lot more of this than Monkey Island 2, and this is the essential difference between the two games. You'll find well over 25 different characters here - all acting individually. They go about their daily life in the quaint, cobbled streets of the town, chatting whenever they please 0 you might be in a pub having a word with the blacksmith, when an old woman walks up to the bar and has a conversation with the barmaid about her noisy neighbours, for instance.

Of course, all this talking proves incredibly useful. To succeed in this game you must consult and chat with every character possible. And when I say every character, I mean every character - right at the beginning you'll come across a bloke called Wulfe, another prisoner, hanging in shackles from the dungeon wall.

He's dying, but in exchange for a drink he tells you some important info to get you started on yoru quest. Here, too, you'll find the serf joker, Ratpouch, who on release from a torture rack becomes your loyal and faithful servant.

Okay, so now that you're at least a little bit familiar with the game's scenario, let's talk about its mechanics. Much of the gameplay is based on questioning other characters, as I said, which is achieved by first finding someone to talk to, then using the mouse to click on that character. This brings up a menu of possible lines to open up the conversation. You can choose between Ask, Tell, Bribe, or Talk To categories from the list which, when selected, bring up a series of menus to help you construct a sentence.

In practice it's not complicated at all - indeed, very intuitive, in many ways more effective than the well worn techniques used by Monkey Island 2. It's more flexible too - you're not limited to a short list of pre-prepared responses to choose between.

This system enables you to construct some quite out-of-the-ordinary requests. For example, you can ask Gwynn, an old lady in one of the bars, if she has a door. It might get you anywhere - it's a fairly pointless request, after all - but even though the tongue-in-cheek response you'll get is a fairly standard one that you'll hear a few times in the game, the fact that you're allowed to ask it in the first place helps build a sense of reality beyond the sort of interactive storybook effect you sometimes get from Lucasfilm games.

The trade off is that the jokes aren't as sharp or as well orchestrated as in Monkey 2 - you do get the odd bit of funny stuff, but it won't be long before the same pun is repeated. Another feature that makes Temptress feel more versatile than either Sierra's King's Quest or Monkey Island 2 is the command option.

This is brought up via the game menus and not only proves very useful, it also allows you to set up a few laughs. For instance, there was much guffawing in the AMIGA POWER office when I sent Ratpouch to the bar. He makes a real twit of himself ordering the beers, you see - watch him get turned down for looking underage, then eventually get served with a shandy.

It isn't all funny stuff, however - in the later stages of the game the command facility becomes very important, when giving the correct order can be a matter of life or death. Your use of commands provides the backbone of this game - it's a very effective feature, one that Sierra and Lucasfilm would do well to pick up on.

Lure Of The Temptress doesn't fall down in providing atmosphere either - it shares with Monkey Island 2 the fact that it's got bags of the stuff. Indeed, with its quaint olde worlde pubs, cottages and cobbled streets all enclosed by a towering city wall, Temptress' scenery is perhaps more believable (at least to a UK audience) than many we've seen - it brings to mind the historical streets and olde worlde feel of York. Might it be that the Hull-based team behind the game were inspired by their neighbouring minster city?

The great area where Temptress score over most rivals, though - and especially the otherwise-very-impressive Monkey Island 2 - is in its user friendliness. The minimal disk swapping of Temptress comes as an incredible relief after the 11 disk nightmare of Monkey 2.

Though you'd ideally have a second disk drive to get the most out of this - Temptress does test your patience with its disk accessing on single drive Amigas - this is by no means the nightmare it could have been.

This is a great game, then. Amazingly, I've got this far into the review without really mentioning the graphics yet - theyre was so much to say - so I'll make amends now. Visually Temptress is gorgeous - in my book its animation and graphics are just as good, if not better than, those in Monkey Island 2. (A good example is the animated wasp sequence when you reach town from the secret passage - it's lovely).

So where does that leave us? Well, with is a very big game, full of scope, and packed with plenty to keep the avid adventurer content. ON their first attempt. Revolution have come up with an adventure game to knock the stuffing out of recent Sierra efforts, and to go head-to-head with its Lucasfilm peers. It's quite a remarkable achievement.