The extension to the original game involves fully establishing your base on Alpha Centauri and successfully colonising the new planet while battling with the locals. The ultimate goal is to - wait for this - fly a colony back to Earth again; truly the least original idea MicroProse could have thought of.

You must maintain your bases on Earth while working on Alpha Centauri, and this introduces another concept - that of multiple landscapes. The fantasy and futuristic realms feature more than one building area from the start, but again it's nothing new. They simply sit one on top of the other, with limited links between them.

Other new features include a number of adjusted rules to make the game more varied, plus an accelerated start giving you a couple of villages, but it's a game of compromises and work-arounds, which only increases the impression that amateurs worked on the game. The promised landscape designer is missing, while the scenario editor is complex and buggy. The readme file is a manual addendum, telling you that this feature hasn't been included and that one doesn't work properly and, regrettably, this section has been removed. Even the multiplayer option only supports IPX play. Where's the email system, at the very least?

Even the serious fan won't find much else here. The extra scenarios are less playable than the original, and at £30 you can't help but think that you're being ripped off. Call to Power is considerably better, while the original Civ II can be found for a tenner.