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To date, Novagen have only released two games, Encounter in 1984 and Mercenary in November 1985. In July 1986, The Second City was released, giving Mercenary addicts another city to explore.

Such was the success of Mercenary and The Second City that there are now 56 foreign language or machine versions of the two original products.

It comes as no surprise to learn that Mercenary II is on the way. Known as Damocles, it is set in an imaginary solar system with nine planets and eleven moons, the game features filled and shaded graphics showing the light and dark sides of each planet.

This space arena provides the backdrop to a scenario in which your task is to avert the comet Damocles from collision with the system's fifth planet.

Damocles is being programmed on the Atari ST and should be available early in the New Year.

Luckily for us, Novagen's wizard programmer, Paul Woakes, has found time to produce Backlash, a full-blooded, no-nonsense blaster.

Obviously inspired by his earlier game, Encounter, Woakes has decided to forsake the complex strategy of Mercenary, to concentrate on moving as many solid objects in free space, as the ST will allow, purely and simply so you can have the pleasure of blasting them off the screen.

For once, a company has had the guts to publish a game with no pretentious scenario on the cover. Instead, this is printed:

"Backlash is a fast-action arcade game. Objective is high score. Radar sights head up display shows enemy locations. Action is continuous with increasing difficulty. Five lives to start. Extra life awarded every 10,000 points."

And that pretty well sums up the game, except to say that it is one of the fastest, most playable arcade games ever!

Set on a flat grey plain, over which you can move in any direction, Backlash puts you at the controls of whatever vehicle you care to imagine. All you can do, in said vehicle, is move in any direction over the plane, and shoot straight ahead of you.

Your view is a full screen, head-up Battlezone-type display. A simple radar display is overlaid in the centre of the screen.

On it can be seen the enemy - anything that moves - in white, and their fire - anything that moves even faster - shown in red.

The only other things to clutter up the screen are the score and high-score displays in the top left- and right-hand corners respectively.

If you have an ST and you like shooting things, then buy Backlash. It's that simple.