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Aliens are attempting to cross your eight-sector hyperspace causeway, and that makes you real mad. You'll have to defend this astronautical M25 with your spacecraft, which rotates at the centre of a circular area.

In each section there's a circling bomb on a short fuse, threatening your territory and flickering with increasing intensity as it approaches detonation. And those multimutated aliens travel around the perimeter of this space zone, within range of your blaster.

Some aliens are blocks, which when blasted release rotating circles (these in turn produce green discs that can be shot to temporarily keep alien bombs out of the zone and earn hit points); others are orbs, and destroying them reduces the damage done to the zone in which you're fighting.

But your own laser blasts can rebound from reflective spheres, produced when an alien target is missed, and damage your precious property.

Coloured bars in an eight-sectioned laser scan indicate the time remaining before a bomb explodes in each sector, and you can also use the laser scan to move to another sector.

Joysticks: Kempston, Sinclair, Cursor
Graphics: plain and unappealing
Sound: BP spot effects

'I got Asteroids free in a sixpack of games with my first rubber-keyed Spectrum, and Lazer Wheel is much the same, right down to the oversized drain-cleaners. It's tough to cope with, too - there are only a few places where you can kill the drain-cleaners, and if you shoot anywhere else the shot rebounds'

'The loading and title screens are very good, but as soon as you get into the game the poor graphics and frustrating movements are thoroughly nauseating. It's a bit like Asteroids, the ancient arcade game that I always regretted putting 10p in. But you can't even move so much in Lazer Wheel'

'There's an interesting idea behind Lazer Wheel, but alas playing it isn't so interesting: though there are eight levels the only change is in the speed of the aliens'