As I saw in other threads this game causes a lot of trouble. The game seems to freeze or crash at the beginning wenn the option "start new game" is chosen. And this happens despite the fact that the installation and the intro movie run without any problems.
Finally i found out: The problem is caused by the Vesa drivers! The game doesn't seem to recognize automatically the drivers of newer graphic cards.
So here is what you have to do get this nice game working:
1) Install the game
2) Put in the created game Folder the files: Univbe.exe, vbetest.exe
3) Edit the start.bat file
4) After the second line ("@echo off") write: "univebe.exe" and below "vbetest.exe".
5) Save the new content of start.bat
6)Start the game with start.bat.

This time the game should run normally!
It did for me at least!
If you can't make it work with the univesa.exe driver, try the same steps, this time using the VBEPLUS driver (vbeplus.exe).