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Your space station's been infested by alien insectoid wrecking crews, and, wouldn't you know it, Rentokill's deep space surcharge is just beyond your budget. The only thing to do is to set up a communications beam from your distant spaceship, then use it to remotely control a maintenance droid. The droid has to do his best to eradicate the aliens from all four labyrinthine station decks, while looking for the four parts of a teleport device. Once they've assembled, he can teleport to the alien mothership, plant a bomb, destroy it and save the solar day.

The droid comes in three bits which have their own weapons and power sources, allowing them to operate independently or as a combination. When separated, you can flip between overhead views of each component's surroundings, so uniting them is just a question of programming each bit to go to a deck-to-deck teleporter and moving them all to the same part of the station.

Once they're together, you can get down to a serious search. The teleport parts are all in locked lockers, so the droid needs to find the pass to unlock the locker and bulkhead doors on a deck. For these, he has to search unlocked lockers, which can also hold tools to repair damaged consoles and parts which he can assembly into weapons such as proximity mines or deck cannons.

Luckily for him, the aliens don't see the droid as much of a threat, so he doesn't have to worry about them zapping him too much. However, they come in a multitude of forms, some more dangerous than others. The real pain is the pupal Sucker which wriggles around sucking away at your energy if it finds you. Blockers are like large beetles - slow, but if you shoot one, it sits down and draws its legs under its shell, blocking the corridor until you pump a load of laser into it.

If you kill an alien anywhere, it transmits sympathy waves to the nearest alien pod, which pops open and gives birth to another blocker. So, to clear the ship, you have to destroy each pod with a mine, then lock up that section of the station with a deck pass, making sure any damaged computers and communications have been repaired first.

Damage level and repairs for both the droid and the ship are two of the things you have to keep a constant check on. If the aliens completely wreck the ship's communications facilities, contact with the droid is lost and it's game over. If they wreak havoc on the engineering deck they can damage the reactors and leave decks running on reduced power with emergency lights only.

Its neat touches like this which really add to the atmosphere, and it's on that score that Contact really makes an impact. As well as the red emergency lights, there are a load of features taken from Sci-Fi movies. One of the decks is very Nostromo-esque, the monsters and their mothership are also reminiscent of Alien and even the way the robot walks is rather "Robocop-y".

Although the robot's equipped with a laser, the gameplay is much more strategy than blasting, but the task is very engrossing indeed. It's lucky you can save the game to disk because there's so much to do. However, the fact that there's so much in the game means you can play it for ages without getting bored.

It's a shame that the robot's inertia makes the joystick control tricky to handle, but as far as I can see, that it the only real flaw in an otherwise excellent game. Thinking gamers, check it out.

Tangible atmosphere and lots of playability make Contact much more than just another maze game.