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Life as a Thunderforce pilot is a busy one. Fresh back from your alien-destroying exploits in Thunderforce II, you're rold that there's trouble at Myll, a six-planet system on the Eastern spiral arm of our galaxy - and it's your job to sort it out. Pausing only to fit some new weapons system onto your battle damaged Thunderforce fighter, off you go to war.

The battle is waged over six different planets, represented by six, long horizontally scrolling levels. Each one is populated by a variety of loony aliens all hent bent on your destruction, and there's the usual whopper end of level baddie to blow up.

Supply craft occasionally fly by, and if destroyed, they add a useful extra weapon to your armament of forward and rear-firing lasers, such as beam lasers, homing missiles and a pair of two drones which spin around your ship and protect it to a certain extent.

So now you know the score - go in there an' kick ass.

I'm a great fan of Thunderforce II and have been waiting for this sequel with much anticipation. Is it as good as its predecessor?

You bet your boots, matey! The graphics are simply stunning, with superb parallax scrolling backdrops (The incredible flame effect on planet two has to be seen to be believed), fleets of amazing alien craft to blast and some of the best end-of-level baddies seen in ages, especially the fire-breathing robo-Godzilla, which caused much eyeball-popping around the office.

As well as looking great, it sounds great too, with an ear-pumping array of cracks, crunches and explosions enhacing the action perfectly. This audio/visual feast wouldn't be worth anything if the gameplay was poor, but thankfully Thunderforce III has it in abundance.

Six planets might not sound many, but they're tough and completing them all takes plenty of practice. And even if you do manage to finish the game, there are three more difficulty levels to maintain the challenge. Thunderforce III is the state of the art in shoot-'em-up technology and is easily one of the best console games yet seen.