Blade is a stunning new role playing - Dungeons & Dragons like game from Alive Mediasoft, but differs from other RPG games, as it's all about exploration in Blade. The idea of the game, is that he idea is, you enter some dungeons, find some treasure, find some gold, kill a few monsters and get experience points. On the way you can gain spells and just generally have a look around. You can then go back to the surface, buy some better weapons and armour and go back and explore even further.

You take control of four characters, of which you choose from a selection including Dwarfs, Elfs, Wizards and Warriors. The game uses a similar system to that of UFO in that each character has a certain number of movements points, once all these are used up for each character it is the end of that turn. The computer will then take it's turn, once done, it is back to you. This is a very good system that works really well in this game.

The levels in Blade are randomly generated so you will never play the same level twice, as well as this there is also the option to modify level specifications such as maze density and difficulty, giving you the chance to virtually create your own levels.

When it comes to spells in Blade, there are a total of 28 altogether and they are only available to those characters that possess maigcal powers (Wizard, Elf and Cleric). The spels aren't given to you, so you must go out and find them and they vary ffrom simple healing, to turning monsters into stone to mental waves of energy. There are also about 40 potions/scrolls in the game, which are available to all, having many different effects such as turning the user invisible and creating energy bolts.

The graphics, although being quite small, are very well detailed and on an AGA machine are in 256 colours.

The ECS version of the game will run on any Amiga with at least 1Mb of RAM. As for the AGA version, this requires an 030 and 4Mb FAST RAM. Both versions will install to Hard-drive.

The game is being released on floppy disk, will cost only £14.99 and should be available very soon. Currently, a demo of Blade is available only from the Amiga Flame web site.