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BATTLING IN THE BLOODSTREAM

Prepare yourself for a fantastic voyage. You've volunteered to undertake a dangerous mission inside Nick Roberts's stomach! With Raquel Welch by your side, you must guide a microscopic ship through places where only 9-inch pizzas have ventured before.

The reason behind this strange mission is that Nick, an expert at poking games, recently decided to do a similar thing to himself. He implanted raw DNA (a kind of groovy acid) and a growth accelerator into his own brain, in a bid to improve his intelligence. Unfortunately, the experiment failed, and left the Tips man with a rapidly-expanding noddlebox (no wonder he's been getting big-headed!).

Before Nick's head explodes, you must reach his brain and kill the implant with the help of a growth inhibitor, broken into six parts, scattered around his body. While doing battle with Nick's natural defences, you must find keys to enable you to pass through blood vessels to other horizontally-scrolling body parts.

While floating around in someone else's body doesn't appeal to me a great deal, this game is initially quite playable. Control of the craft is a bit suspect though: even with the speed-up feature active, it moves very much like a drunken tortoise. Despite its unusual setting, DNA Warrior is another unexceptional shoot-'em-up.

MARK ... 56%

THE ESSENTIALS Joysticks: Kempston, Sinclair Graphics: not bad, if a mite dull Sound: blip, blip, blip...

'DNA Warrior seems like a fairly well-programmed beast, but unfortunately its addictiveness is sorely marred by one or two frustrating factors. The ship-turning procedure can be absolutely maddening - it takes one whole screen-width to turn around! This very nearly wrecks the enjoyment of the game, because the ship often flies all around the screen by accident, usually ending in the loss of a life! The graphics are fine, but the action is very slow: unlike most similar shoot-'em-ups, it doesn't romp along at a fast rate - instead, it crawls! DNA Warrior isn't the sort of game likely to appeal to blast freaks - it's too frustrating to be addictive, and too slow to be particularly playable.'