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Some games just "work", don't they? For whatever reason, you can play them over and over again and they never get old. Beach Head - the title referring to an enemy fortress on a heavily-defended beach - is one of these games. It has four distinct sections in a single load but, rather than feel like mini-games loosely strung together, it feels like what it's meant to represent: a military campaign to crush 'Kuhn-Lin'. What's more, there's no need to read any instructions on how to play - it's very intuitive and it only uses the four directional controls and the fire button. Originally it was a Commodore 64 game produced by the American software company Access, and it hit the shelves of the UK under the banner of newly-formed US Gold.

After a digitised loading screen, the game draws a simplistic map and offers you a straightforward choice - go left through the "hidden" passage or go down for a direct assault. If you go left you hit the first mini-game - a left, right, acclerate and break game in which you must cross a channel of water strewn with bullets and buoys, both fatal to the touch. You have control of a small ship which is struggling against a gale-force wind. Or, at least, that's the only plausible reason why it can only press onward and can never turn back.

You can angle it to nine, ten, eleven or twelve o' clock and all you need to do to complete this first mini-game is to get at least one ship from the bottom-right corner of the screen to the top-left of it. All the graphics are multi-coloured and being so limited in your direction of travel makes for a pretty nerve-wracking game. You quickly learn to assess the velocity of your ship and to pull up if you need to and let a bullet whizz past before continuing. Every craft you make through this passage safely increases the health you have available in the next mission. However, if you chose down at the beginning, this mini-game is skipped and you are just alloted a random amount of health for it.

Labelled General Quarters in the inlay, the next mission is set on the open seas and places two tankers, two aircraft carriers and one liner on a horizon. You are beneath the waves in a submarine and your periscope guns jut up in the foreground at the very bottom of the screen. When the mission starts, the boats are invincible and your targets are the military crafts which emerge from the aircraft carriers, gain ground and then sonic boom their way out of the playing area dropping a couple of bombs on your head as a goodbye present. You shoot at them and attempt to blow them up mid-flight but your missiles take a little time to reach their altitude. Hence, you must play with enough skill that the possibility of them "getting away" is minimised. Rather like that annoying reportage droid in Space Invaders, there's also another plane that glides from left to right over the playing area. This plane is gathering intel for the enemy and you get big bonus points for blasting it to smithereens... so get to it.

After a time, all the planes disappear and you must now attempt to sink those up-to-now-impossible-to-sink battleships. Whether this counts as an additional mission is debateable; it's called Naval Battle in the instructions but it's really just a variation of fighting the ships rather than the aircraft. The difference is that, with the aircraft, you had to aim your guns on them and score a bullseye to see them wiped out; the ships don't need to be specifically targeted with the up and down controls. Instead up and down change the elevation of your Big Gun and, each time it is fired, you get an immediate report of how 'short' or 'long' the missile landed off target. By changing the elevation, you can eventually score a direct hit on each of the tankers in turn. You just have to learn not to stress as you inevitably take some damage whilst working it out.

Complete this bit (not hard on the easy skill level!) and, a short mappy section later, you'll play the two tougher mini-games. The first is the enemy-controlled beach which is an unusual sideways scrolling left-to-right (yes, it may well be the only left-to-right scrolling game in the world!) shoot-'em-up and avoid-o-rama. The beach is littered with mines, bits of wood and tripod-style guns, and you must guide a tank through this entourage without colliding with anything, including bullets. Your health at the end of the previous mission determines how many tanks you have for this push against the enemy and it is possible (on the lowest skill level) to entirely defeat Kuhn-Lin with only two of them. However, you will need either a great deal of luck, or experience, to do so because when you reach the end of the beach, that's far from being the end.

Instead, the very final mini-game is a variation of the second (General Quarters) with the sea tankers now replaced by a fortress. On the top of the fortress is an extremely big gun which slowly turns your way, fires and never misses. However, blinking windows on the fortress indicate the areas where you should fire yourself and, with the experience you've gained from the two battle sequences in the middle of the game, you shouldn't find it too difficult to land at least five hits before the inevitable flash signalling the loss of your tank. As you only need to obliterate ten of the windows to see the enemy raise the white flag, you might well achieve this end with the loss of only a single tank if you keep a cool head and lady luck is on your side.

With three skill levels (I've never managed to complete it on the hardest difficulty level!), it's difficult to find anything to complain about. It's all extremely fast, very colourful and it's all so varied that the player's attention never drops. It's sort of mindless fun of the best sense - whilst you could argue that, technically, none of the sub-games are very accomplished, they're clearly programmed so well that the whole becomes more than the sum of these parts. On its release, just in time for Christmas 1985, it was something of a unique product for the Electron - it might not have been pushing away at the Electron's very boundaries in an Exile/Sim City sense but it was quite definitely state of the art. Electron User thought it was great and Home Computing Weekly found it "well designed, compulsive and excellent value".

And yet, Acorn User was heavily critical for some reason. It stated that neither the action nor the graphics were particularly impressive... and implied that all Electron owners should steer well clear of actually buying it. I really struggle to see any evidence for that opinion. Personally, I think the graphics are very impressive - you have planes, ships, tanks, boats, submarines and all manner of obstacles, not to mention five different scenarios, all contained in a single load. And the action is pretty much relentless throughout. What more did they want?

Beach Head was initially released as a full-price £9.95 cassette release, and (much) later, appeared on the Americana budget range for £2.99. Interestingly for such a good (and quite well-respected Electron game), it was never included on any compilation, meaning those are your only two options if you want to collect up a physical version. It's not rare, but seems to fetch a fairly reasonable £4 - £7 when sold second hand.