Extractors is the follow-up to Diggers - the first game to appear exclusively on the CD32. An amalgamation of several game genres and ideas, it drew upon the resourcefulness, patience and tactical planning of the gamer.

The player had to choose from four types of Diggers, each with their own peculiar strengths and weaknesses, with the aim of mining as many jewels and precious stones as possible from underneath the planet Zarg. The main drawback of Diggers were the awkward control system, the quirky artificial intelligence and the ability to lose against the computer opponent without any warning.

On the plus side, the game taxed the ingenuity, leaving an open-ended approach to completion. Many found that, despite this flexibility, Diggers was a slog rather than enjoyable.

This time, the structure of the game hinges on a specific goal. There are 30 planets to be visited and mined, the aim being that you blow up the planet's reactor and mine enough fuel to get your spacecraft to the next planet.

Due to the nature of the mining, the structure of the networks already in place, the traversing and exploration and the increasing difficulty levels, there are plenty of elements to get your teeth into. But it feels too much like work rather than fun. Take the three race types and the artificial intelligence tagged on to them. Much like Diggers, they can get bored with mining and wander off. If they do, they can fall down mine shafts, drown or get killed.

It begs the question, why, if the creatures are intelligent enough to get bored, are they too stupid to stop themselves getting killed?

Despite the fact that Extractors is a well-planned game, and that it's open ended enough for some truly ingenious solutions, it just doesn't grab you.
Oh, and as an afterthought, Extractors could have been much more fun if there was a serial link. Extractors 2 perhaps?

Over the years, my tolerance for this sort of thing has been much reduced. After an hour of screaming profanities at the screen and trying to work out exactly what the ("Flip" - Ed) was going on in the game, I thumbed my way through a well-used copy of issue 30 to confirm my worst fears - I'd given Diggers (the game to which this one's a sequel) an astonishing 80%.

The odd thing was that although I'd mentioned all the things that annoyed me about Diggers, I hadn't marked it down for them. Why? Well, I was new to this and it was the first CD32 specific game, so maybe in my naive youth I thought a good mark might aid sales. But thankfully, the next issue, Tim Norris gave the A1200 version a more realistic mark of 72%, letting me off the hook somewhat. Phew, eh?

Tim's main criticism was that although Diggers was noble, well programmed and a truly novel idea, playing it was as much fun as an eight hour shift on the checkout at Sainsburys, which is as good a point as any to start talking about Extractors.

Diggers was set on sprawling levels where you ahd to develop a mine system and extract as many jewels and minerals as possible, reaching a set level before your computer controlled opponents did. You could break into their mine workings, sabotage them or even kill the baddies with explosives, or you could just buy lifts, rail tracks and diffing machines and diligently search for the goodies. It was a good idea, but after a few hours, a whole load of problems emerged, of which all but a few have been sorted out for Extractors.

The levels on Diggers were huge, and the players were supposed to search them to find the richest veins of jewels. This never happened of course, so most people only saw a fraction of the game.

Extractors is set on 30 floating rock worlds (24 big ones, 5 timed bonus asteroids and a final, end of game one) that are pretty compact. You can't dig through gravel sections and so are restricted to the soil bits of each asteroid, which are invariably packed with jewels and goodies.

EXHALERS
The competition aspect of Diggers just didn't work. In theory it seemed fine, but frequently you played for three hours only to be told that your opponents had won, which was howlingly annoying. Extractors sets you better defined goals. On each rock, you've got to find and destroy a power generator and then get enough fuel to fly to the next rock. Excavated jewels give you money to buy things, and after knocking out 24 generators, the defence shield on the final level will be deactivated, allowing you to plunder the last asteroid.

To thwart your plans are roaming monsters and mercenaries, but the main obstacle is finding your way from your ship to each generator, in a Lost Vikings/Fury of the Furries kind of way. Tunnels have to be made, flaoting platforms bought to transport team members over and across obstacles and baddies have to be taken out with missiles and explosives, but the game revolves around teleport poles.

Each creature in your team can teleport between these poles, so by saving up for them and placing them carefully, only the first member has to cross the tricky bits to plant a new pole, and the others can just warp in, which is a great idea.

The control system of Diggers was an ill-conceived, badly implemented and limply tested nightmare, and unfortunately, this is where Extractors starts its slippery descent to mediocrity.

Extractors gives you up to five team members to control, which in itself is a tricky proposition. You can at least make them jump now, so they can usually avoid plummeting down vertical shafts, and also make them stop by pressing a single button rather than trying to rush through numerous menus, so many improvements are evident.

EXHUMERS
The idea with your team, presumably, is to have some digging, some collecting jewels and the one you're controlling at that moment doing something tricky and involving. After all, it worked for a team of three in the Lost Vikings, so why not five?

I'll tell you. It's because the man responsible for this has retained the preposterous notion that it'd be fun if each character has a mind of its own. He thinks it's amusing if you spend ages getting one extractor to a tricky spot only to have it get bored and teleport back to base.

He thinks it's improving the game when a bored digger leaves a tunnel, blunders into a scorpion and is killed. He thinks it's a hoot when you've got three seconds of fuel left on a floating platform that you're using to get an extractor up to another level, but another one wanders into a pool and drowns before your very eyes because you haven't got time to save it. He's wrong on all counts. It's all terrible.

Unfortunately, even if you took out this clearly stupid free-will stuff, it still wouldn't save the game, because as Tim mentioned two years ago and I've found out to my cost over the past three days, playing Extractors is a completely fun-free experience.

Even on my third go, the first level took over an hour of digging, buying and plating teleport poles before I reached the generated and blew it up. And when you've got the survivors back to the ship, then what? Another level, and another. Then another 20 odd. Sob.

The time-restricted asteroid levels try to impart a sense of urgency and fun into the proceedings, but with minimal success. The endless pretty pictures of fantasy worlds, books of knowledge and video clips of trading officers seem to suggest that the programmers have spent so long in their fantasy world that they've forgotten their original intent - to produce an entertaining game.

After this evening, one thing is certain - I shall never, every play this game again.