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Here's a game for all you arcade game players that suffer from 10p-nitus (lack of ten pence pieces for your favourite machines!). The game is of course, you guessed it, a take off of "Defender", and a pretty good take off at that. The game features most of the features of the arcade original, including humanoids to be rescued from the grip of the alien landers, mutants, baiters and other little oddities to ensure sleepless nights. There is even a radar at the top of the screen (as in the original), showing how many little nasties are left to be dealt with as dots.

The action and screen scrolling is fast and smooth, enough to prove a real challenge. The graphics are good, very good in fact. When you rescue a falling humanoid, you see a small "500" whizzing past your ship showing the amount of bonus points you received. Very impressive! There is even reverse! All in all, the game is quite like the "Real Thing" except for the fact that you can use Interface II and Kempston joystick interfaces with the Spectrum version is something you can definitely not do with the arcade version!)

Another little advantage of the Spectrum version is the game produces special codes to verify your high-scores, Hyperspace is no problem except for the fact that when you use the hyperspace button, you sometimes get materialised onto an alien, which results in an instant ship loss.

The instructions on the inlay card are quite good. There are graphic representations of what the aliens look like in the screen, with the scores for shooting the alien alongside. The only problem is the inlay card instructions assume you know how to play the game Defender already.

My only gripe about this game is that there is no sound during the course of it, not even the low growl of the engines, or even when you shoot an alien nasty. In fact, the only sound being when a lander takes a humanoid, there is a low series of clicks and when you go into hyperspace or get killed, there is a sound like something you could make using a FOR...NEXT loop, with a BEEP statement in the middle.