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After a fifteen year battle, the Jaglan Group has been wiped out apart from one small pocket of resistance on the planet Tantalus where a mighty system of caves and defence systems has been put together. As battles are now fought by mutants rather than humans, it is decided to send a team of four spike punkoids under your command to Tantalus in order to seek out and kill the deviant. In order to achieve your goal, you must first find and open 32 deadly doors by shooting the lock activators.

Tantalus is a huge game with over 1,000 brightly coloured and highly detailed screens. The main feature of the game is that you have six different weapons systems at your disposal ranging from bouncing bombs to penetrator fire. You can even make yourself invisible for a while. These systems all recharge at different rates. Naturally, with all these weapons at your disposal, you might expect a fair bit of enemy resistance and you would not be wrong, there are 48 assorted types of aliens to be blasted. There are many other hazards to be avoided as well, such as pits full of acid, lasers, spikes, force fields and huge mechanical pincers. You start the game by whizzing round with your jetpacks on but these are removed when you walk through an airlock.

Tantalus falls fairly and squarely into the mainstream of arcade adventures, there is nothing particularly original about it but if you enjoy this type of game, Tantalus is bigger and brighter than most. Personally, I've seen it all before and I don't think that there is much here to make it stand out when I am compiling a list of my top 100 arcade adventures.