Each term you'll learn new skills but, instead of manually selecting them, you choose a category and the game randomly gives you one of its skills, e.g., Personal Development might give you Physical, +1 Dexterity, Vice, Hand Combat or Blade Combat. Yet some of these can still have sub-options! For example, Vice can have you learning Bribery, Forgery and other types of skulduggery.

After each term, you can choose to re-enlist or retire and become a mercenary. The longer you serve, the better trained your character, but serve too long and your stats begin to decrease due to old age – you might be expelled or even have an accident and die during character creation! Once you retire, you get one random benefit for each term served – bonus attributes, weapons, armour or simply some cash.

With your party finished, a mysterious woman barges into a bar and hires you to deliver a disc with information that can end the ongoing war. You then leave the bar and get ambushed, starting under enemy fire with no time to prepare or learn the controls.

To make matters worse, the combat is atrocious. Battles play in real time, but the interface is slow and only one character can be controlled at a time. This means your party will stand still while you awkwardly try to order one character to fire at the enemies.

This was such an issue that Paragon Software made a patch for the game, changing the combat to allow players to pause and issue orders. Still, battles remain the worst part of the game – there are no tactics or useful feedback, you just shoot until someone dies. Moreover, hearing about a patch in a pre-Internet era was a challenge, so many players never saw the fixes.

If you manage to survive – or flee – the ambush, the game finally starts properly and you're free to explore the planet's tiny city in a top-down view.