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Impact is a masterpiece of gameplay involving a wall of bricks, a bouncing ball and a bat with which you must keep the ball in play until all of the bricks have been demolished.

Impact is a conversion from the Atari ST, but you'd never know it. Unlike most game conversions, which owe their heritage to some super-micro or other, Impact exhibits none of the tell-tale signs. All too often the programmer commissioned to produce a game conversion bites off more than can be chewed.

Gary Partis has come up with a game which looks and feels as if it was designed specifically for the Electron, and yet has stayed very close to the original.

If the game's theme sounds familiar, you're right. Impact has its origins way back in the old game of Breakout. However, it is as different from Breakout as a Cray III mainframe is from a ZX81. For a start, the stars in the smoothly scrolling starfield move at different speeds. Nothing to do with the gameplay, but indicative of things to come.

The multi-coloured bricks - achieved in Mode 5 by the clever use of stippling - are arranged in quite a devious fashion. On the lower levels you simply demolish them, but as you progress past each screen different types of brick start to appear.

First of all come bricks which need to be hit more than once before they vanish, and later on there are some bricks which are not only indestructible, but invisible as well.

Adding to the fun are various aliens floating around the screen. Although harmless, if the ball touches them it can be badly deflected.

On later levels some aliens drop stun bombs, and if one of these hits your bat it will be paralysed for a second or so - lethal if the action is coming thick and fast at the time.

At the bottom right of the screen is a display panel showing nine different weapons which may be brought into play - the difficulty lies in obtaining them.

Some bricks, when destroyed, release yellow U-shaped tokens which float to the bottom of the screen, flipping end over end as they go. Catching one advances an indicator on the weapons panel, showing you which one you are currently entitled to buy - the more tokens collected, the better the weapon.

Pressing the : key selects the currently indicated weapon, which will remain active until either you are killed or you have completed the screen. Some of the weapons are:

Magnet: Allows you to hold the ball against the bat, letting you move to a better position before releasing it.

Torch: Once selected, this will light up invisible bricks for the remainder of the game.

Laser: Allows rapid fire to quickly destroy bricks.

Missile: Three can be launched, one at a time, after selecting this weapon. They can destroy multi-hit bricks in a single go.

Force field: Selecting this causes the ball to be encircled by an invisible force field which enables it to smash through bricks and aliens without being deflected.

Altogether eighty screens are crammed into the impressive game, and this brings us to the most interesting part of the program - the screen designer. Each time you successfully complete a level, a short password is flashed on the screen which, when entered into the screen designer later on, allows you to edit that particular level to your own liking.

The screen designer is selected from the high-score display. You will be asked to enter the password for that level, after which you are presented with the selected screen, which is now yours to do with as you will.

The Z, X, / and : keys move the editing cursor around the screen, and pressing RETURN places a brick at the current position. Altogether there are fifteen types of brick to select from, and the < and > keys move up or down through the brick types, displayed each one together with its number at the bottom right of the screen.

Here lies my only complaint. No key delay is built into the screen designer - as soon as one is pressed it begins repeating, and it is sometimes quite hard to stop the cursor exactly where you want without overshooting. The same applies to selecting a brick type; more often than not I found myself having to back-pedal.

These are minor points, however, and certainly don't detract from the delight of finally playing some of your own customised screens. You can save all eighty to tape, which means that you can swap your favourite screens with other Impact enthusiasts' creations.

Impact is now one of my all-time favourite Electron games, and it will take a rare program indeed to dislodge it from that position.

Chris Nixon