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As Thunderstruck 2 loads, you are left watching quite a well drawn title screen. Which is rather a blessing as it takes around seven minutes. However, your patience will be rewarded as the game is well worth waiting for.

In this arcade adventure, you start complete with spacesuit and helmet in an underground cavern. You are immediately required to dodge the advances of something that bears a close resemblance to a berserk helicopter. You then make your way through the various screens which present you with a whole host of evil nasties, all intent on reducing your life expectancy.

Your current state of health is shown on screen. If it falls to zero, you will be whisked right back to the underground cavern as you only have one life.

As you pass through the various rooms, you will discover a number of items which can be picked up and used elsewhere on your travels. The problem that you have to work out is where, how and when each of the items should be used. And to add to your problems, you are only allowed to carry one item at a time.

A score is shown on screen which represents your percentage achievement to date - mine remained depressingly low.

Approximately two thirds of the screen is used as the game area - the remainder is used for memory storage. This area does remain blank so you are not distracted by rippling colours.

The graphics are excellent with big chunky sprites and very smooth movement. The sound effects are adequate but they could have been a little more imaginative. However, there is a facility to turn them off if they become too annoying.

My only reservation is whether the game may pall a little once all the problems are solved, but in my case that could take forever anyway. The game does use rather a lot of memory so Plus 1 and Plus 3 owners should ensure that these are disabled before this program is loaded.

I found the game extremely addictive and, while it comes from the same software house that brought us Bug Eyes 2 which has a similar style of graphics, I found this to be the more entertaining of the two.

Beejay