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Outer space is a hostile place, full of different types of spacecraft all blasting each other out of the sky for no apparent reason. When you start Cylon Attack, you have to imagine you're sitting in the cockpit of a spacecraft looking out into deep space, with a targeting system dead centre and a radar top centre. I say "imagine", because Cylon Attack is one of the Electron's earliest games, and its author hadn't twigged that he might be able to render a realistic-looking cockpit interior on-screen. Instead you get blue bordered areas top and bottom and a few aptly-titled icons within them: Shields, Fuel, Climb, Turn and Laser.

Wait around for a moment or two and a cylon will drift into your view and start firing bullets at you. The game's inlay proclaims the fact that both aliens and bullets start off small and get bigger makes for a "3D space battle". It doesn't and indeed, by that token, zooming in on someone's face would be a "3D zoom". Laughable really. And yet, although everything remains resolutely two dimensional, the effect is an interesting one that is unique to Cylon Attack. The ships, of which there are four, are detailed in an attract mode sequence upon loading the game; although the sprites are monochrome, the big ships look suitably menacing enough that as they get "closer" in the game proper you find yourself scrabbling to get them into the crosshairs of the targeting system and take them out.

A typical bout of Cylon Attack goes thus: Check radar for nearby dots. Move left, right, up or down so to engage dot in combat. Wait for dot to drift into cockpit area and start to balloon up in size to the enemy Cylon. Get it between the crosshairs. Fire off your laser. Try and move out of range of any bullets fired by Cylon. Wait for laser to strike or miss Cylon. Move away. Rinse and repeat.

Whilst, in the first few games you play, you're likely to get hit by the Cylon's bullets, you'll quickly learn that these can quite easily be avoided by simply not hanging around 'stationary' for too long. Your craft seems to have a very obvious advantage over the Cylon ships because, when your crosshair changes shape, if you fire your laser, nine times out of ten, it will hit the Cylon and blow it up. That's not the case in reverse. Firstly, you have shields which means that being hit will wipe a chunk off the shields meter but will only send you to Silicon Heaven when the shields meter hits zero. Secondly, it's not hard to outwit any Cylon's bullets - just rock hard and fast in any direction to scroll the bullet out of the cockpit area as soon as it appears... and it will miss you.

This leaves this admittedly quite good looking game with quite a few problems. Problem one is that it's too easy. For the reasons described, there's no real challenge to it. Problem two is that it's too repetitive. On the first level, there are about twenty ships but only two types. Going through the motions of seeking out each ship, reducing it to space dust and then starting over not only takes only the bare minimum of skill but also becomes more boring each time you have to do it.

The situation does improve once you get to level three, in which you have to face off against all four types of Cylon, including a Cylon mothership factory that produces additional enemies as well as bullets. This type of mother(ship) proves particularly evasive and hard to hit, whilst her offspring come out of the womb fighting and also spraying you with bullets. This does somewhat shorten the odds of you withdrawing from the scene without your shields taking a hit or two. Mind you, this sequence is only really exciting the first time it happens; after that it's as repetitive and samey as the other 'battles'!

Gliding around the same outer space as all the Cylons is a yellow dot which is actually your craft's mothership. It's inadvisable to pick any kind of fight when the mothership is on-screen as it's very easy to accidentally hit it with one of your lasers and, as for deliberately targetting it, well, as soon as it's destroyed, that's instant game over... so most people will probably end up blasting seven bells out of it as soon as they realise that level four is almost exactly the same as level three.

The mothership is only there, ostensibly to 'recharge' you on the completion of a level (You have to find and enter her at the end of each!) but likely more to give the player at least a short break from the repetitive nature of the game. You can enter her mid-battle if you desire, although the Cylons will then attack her rather than you and you're unlikely to re-emerge alive... so there's not much point.

Essentially what you get here is a nice-looking game which is completely lacking in any substance of any "just one more go" factor. Before it starts, there are ten pages of instruction, which feels like overkill, as the game is not difficult to understand at all. In addition, a great deal of thought has also gone into the controlling of the spacecraft too, with the view taking its time to centre, roll and readjust, much as you would expect if you were sitting at the controls of the real thing. There's one brilliant feature too - those coincidental moments when one of your lasers takes out two Cylons at the same time. That happens rarely but the sight always fills me with joy.

As one of the Electron's earliest games, and with very few other games on the shelves for the Electron, you can probably guess at the reception the first '3D' game received. "Excellent," said Acorn User. "Brilliant", said Home Computing Weekly. And "I can't find anything about it to criticise," gushed Electron User. Cylon Attack, so it seems, was the state of the art in 1983. Time has, however, not been kind to it. If you consider the enduring appeal of its stablemate Chuckie Egg, also written by Doug Anderson and also released by A 'n F Software, it really puts it in perspective. As a similarly ubiquitous title - there must have been hundreds of parents buying anything that even seemed half-decent in December 1983! - it can be snapped up second hand for just a few quid now. I'd say it's worth having for your collection, but only just.