"Okay, let's get the funnies out of the way. Queen The Eye does not feature a re-animated Freddie Mercury floating around, twanging monsters with his mike-stand. Brian May does not materialise as an end-of-level boss melting you with deadly 18th-fret guitar solos. Blah blah. Anita Dobson. Blah blah blah. Men dressed up as women with vacuum cleaners. Blah blah. Gordon's alive?! Blah, blah. Ok, now the straight stuff. The Eye is a flick screen, Alone In The Dark-style arcade adventure 'inspired' by the iconography and music of Queen. It's set in a lugubrious Dystopian future, where all vestiges of creativity have been suppressed by a bio-mechanical despot, The Eye. You play Dubroc, a hard-nosed ex-cop who accidentally discovers hidden archives of music and is sentenced to death in The Arena - one of five surreal worlds to be traversed before Dubroc can unleash his repressed creativity and free his world. Hmmmmmm. Each gloriously 3D-rendered environment on each CD is based around a handful of images, locales and characters either lofted from Queen lyrics or depicted on their album sleeves. So in The Works Zone, for instance, you will see the tower from Radio Ga-Ga and find yourself dealing with machinations of The Killer Queen. In the Innuendo Domain, which is set in a fairground, there's a whole bunch of Grandeville illustrations and you are stalked by Death On Two Legs. Each CD has 20 minutes of Red Book audio of 'new' Queen music - remixes, snippets and instrumentals, none of which has ever been heard before. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it sounds incredibly…naff. We know. But in reality it's actually pretty good. The geezer behind the project is Richard Ashdown, ex-MicroProse, ex-Electronic Arts producer. About two years ago, he recruited a bunch of industry talent - artists, programmers, animators - pitched an idea at Queen and then spent 18 months trying to make a game out of what is, on paper, a pretty hokey concept. "Yeah, we had a bit of stigma to negotiate," Richard says. "There were moments of black despair. It was bigger and harder than anything I'd ever done before." With the not-insubstantial coffers of Queen behind him, Ashdown decided to create a hardcore, genre-straddling epic. The team rendered more than 600 camera angles and jammed in over 30 characters and 100 real-time objects. They then set up a motion-capture stage and spent a week recording 1,000 motion-captured combat moves. Then, in a moment of inspired casting, they got Jackie Pearce and Paul Darrow (who played Servalan and Avon in Blake's 7) to do the voices and have their faces motion-captured so the characters would have full facial animation. They then squeezed in over 55 tracks of Queen's music, plus 30 clips from 15 videos. Finally, they beefed it all up with the Brender engine, adding dynamic lights and shadows, texture-mapping and z-buffering. The end result is a weird mix of beat 'em up, adventure and puzzler replete with coffee-table Myst style visuals and a rather spiffy atmos. The next obvious question then, is how much input did the Queen band members have? "They think it's great," says Ashdown. "They're interested in seeing their music in a new medium. They've spent hours here, looking at everything and they're really pleased. They each have their own individual opinion." They only thing Queen apparently vetoed was a smattering of gore that was originally coded into the fight routines. Dubroc has a healthy range of combat moves, based around Aikido rather than the overblown martial arts of Tekken or Virtual fighter. He performs palm, elbow and knee strikes, executes judo rolls and somersaults. He also picks up blades, spears or pipes and goes through a broad range of Bokken moves. He can grab weapons too - handguns, crossbows and machine guns - all satisfyingly throaty and messy. In between all the scrapping and exploring lies a healthy vein of puzzle solving and interaction. Major characters often have to be placated with objects obtained from deadly crypts or monster-infested chambers. These in turn offer clues to a larger puzzle and there'll often be alternate solutions to each episode - you can choose to take the bastard route and kick the crap out of everyone or you can be more diplomatic and smooze your way to the end. Dubroc is frequently presented with a moral choice, either to save this person or rescue that. As the story unfolds, he gradually grows in skill and makes allies, notably Kazan, a female assassin sent after him by The Eye. She slowly comes round to Dubroc's way of thinking and becomes a kind of 'helper bot', a non-player character to show objects to and throw questions at. Dubroc is relentlessly pursued throughout all the zones by Death On Two Legs, a hideous Monsty-Baddy™ which takes on a different form in each domain and attempts to lure Dubroc to an untimely death. With ten or more characters per level, Dubroc has to sift through visual and narrative clues to work out who's who. It all looks pretty interesting and quite unique. There's no doubt that the rendered visuals are stunning. Each zone is about a mile square, textured and lit in slick detail, with huge tower, pock-marked dungeons, slime pits, wheat fields and an overall Victorian, Industrial revolution meets Cyberpunk feel, if you catch our drift. The five CD's of music are bound to get greasy Germanic Queen fans slavering. The visuals should get the Myst crowd damp, while the combat/puzzling elements should make it moderately interesting for us professional gamers. ".