Believe it or not the United Nations World Food Programme has become a games publisher. Head to its Web site and you can download this game, Food Force, free of charge, although please note that it's 227MB for the PC version or 198MB for the Mac fraternity, so you'll need a Broadband connection.

Food Force is aimed at ages 8-13 years, and as you would expect the United Nations takes a different view than that taken by most games publishers, so for once you won't visit strange and exotic new locations, meet interesting people and then shoot them in the head, and after that steal their guns and ammo.

Instead, Food Force is all about disaster relief on the fictitious island of Sheylan and is broken down into six missions. You start with Air Surveillance which is described as 'A classic 'find-em' game' where you pilot a helicopter to map out the terrain so you know where to direct your relief efforts.

In the second mission, called Energy Pacs, you make educated guesses to create a balanced diet for the victims of the disaster. After that you air-drop food from your cargo plane into the crisis zone. Missions four and five involve food logistics and delivery, and the final mission is Future Farming where you use food aid to help the island get back on its feet.

We found the game quite frustrating to play as the objectives aren't spelled out clearly, but if you've ever played any of the kids' games on the CBeebies Web site you'll know what realfrustration is all about. Most of the missions require a fair amount of luck rather than manual dexterity and a gritty determination to succeed, so we suggest that adults steer a wide berth and leave it to the kids.

Naturally the World Food Programme uses the www.food-force.com site to draw comparisons between disaster relief as a game and the rather more serious work that it carries out every day. You can also use the site to post your game scores so you can see how you compare against the global competition, but if our experiences are anything to go by then they all cheat, and badly, to get on the high score leaderboard.

Food Force isn't particularly good as a kids' game compared to, say, the excellent Lego Star Wars, but it's free of charge and there's a strong educational message behind the game. Additionally it makes a welcome change to find a game that you can definitely, absolutely leave the kids to play without any fear that they'll stumble across inappropriate content. And they may even learn something while they play.