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A good few seconds of intense thought must have gone into the game plot of Northstar. It's about as threadbare as the office carpet. It does not twinkle. It does not shrine. Get my drift?

However, the resulting game survives the paucity of thought and manages to provide playable but unmemorable entertainment.

So for those of you who like a good plot with original ideas and twists had better skip the next paragraph or so and just read about the gameplay.

For the rest of you, here goes... In the year 2499, the Earth is over-populated and facing starvation. Nations war over food. The Earth Lords, whoever they may be, call a meeting and thrash out a plan of action to ease the crisis, resulting the Northstar Project.

They decide to construct a vast space station capable of holding thousands of people. And there, in the quietness of space, they would grow foods high in nutritional value very efficiently. And very quickly.

Things went well until one day there was no answer from Northstar. And that's where you come in. You're sent on a mission to find out what's going on. Well, I bet you've guessed already. Alien hordes have over-run Northstar. The people have all disappeared and life-support systems are not functioning.

Your mission - surprise, surprise - is to destroy all the aliens and reactivate the life-support systems.

So it's off on a bash 'n thrash through the levels, collecting oxygen and weapons. I quite like the weapon you start off with. It's a robotic arm rather like an extendable Neptune's trident. Other weapons you can collect - five in all - include smart bombs.

Northstar is nicely programmed, colourful with nice sound and quite playable. But then so are hundreds of other games.

However, this is probably the best game I've seen on the Amstrad this month.