A sign of the times, perhaps? When you open the box for Tron 2.0, you're immediately faced with blatant ads for Nvidia and Intel, insinuating that to get the best of the game you need to invest in products from these two firms. Call us rebellious, but we tested the game on an Athlon XP 2200 rig, replete with an ATI Radeon graphics cards. We'll be smoking behind the bike sheds next.

Tron 2.0, then; an entirely PC-based sequel to the early '80s light cycle film that spawned umpteen shareware games over the years. It's fair to say that, visually, things have moved on an awful lot in that time, for the first thing to hit you about the game is its vivid graphical style. It goes far beyond the original look of the film, and also looks radically different in many ways to the current crop of first person titles on the market. That's a very good thing.

It takes a slightly different approach to characters than most, too, with you having to take on the role of a digitized Jet Bradley, who seeks to eradicate corruption from within the cyber system itself. Jet, as he progresses, discovers and adds new routines to his own program, which can increase his abilities.

However, like much within the game, his routines are also prone to corruption, and his inner system needs regular 'defragmenting' to get everything working properly. His adventure takes him through the likes of a PC, for instance, and a fully infected server.

In fact, pretty much the whole game world has a tie-in to some sort of computer program; the characters within the game are just programs and constant updates appear on your screen with various techno-babble informing you of what's happening in the virtual game world.

The whole set up does, to be honest, take a little getting used to. The learning curve is slightly steeper than usual, but then you are getting something that looks a damn sight different. What you aren't getting, though, is a vastly different gameplay experience. Aside from some enjoyable light cycle interludes, the thrust of the game is first person exploration and action, relying on the many of the conventions of the genre.

Puzzles, for instance, usually revolve around finding the right piece of code to help you open a door, while there's a lot of jumping around to find the things you are looking for. It slows the pace down of the game quite a lot, and that's a shame. When the momentum of Tron 2.0 kicks in, it really is gameplaying bliss, but too often it's just not sustained.

What Tron 2.0 does very much have in its favour is the enemy AI, which is some of the strongest we've seen. Likewise, another mark in the credit column must go to the game world, which is fun to explore and at times dazzling to look at. Plus, at its core, it's a really enjoyable game. Just not a classic.

This is a package that looks nicer than it actually is. Tron 2.0's look stands out from the pack, and it's a fine homage to the movie. However, when it boils down to it, there's a fairly conventional game underneath it. Fortunately, it's a pretty good one.