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You're on your own, flying a one man spaceship - and you're flying into a certain trap - but is it certain death?

After a number of re-writes of the same old train game, and a rather indifferent ladders and ramps game, it is good to see The Man come up with a game that really suits his style.

Trap is (for want of a better phrase) a shoot-'em-up in a style that is almost, but not quite, of a type completely different from Uridium. You fly your ship up the screen over a smooth scrolling landscape and kill things, that's it! Well no actually, I lied, there is rather more to it than that. So I present Trap.

The object of the game is to collect orbs, one orb can be collected per level. With more orbs, you can get better ships to fight with, so orb collection is fairly important.

You start off with a basic ship, with low firepower, a high fuel consumption rate, no cargo-carrying capacity, and not much manoeuvreability to speak of. There are five different ships in all, the top one goes like crazy, shoots like a machine-gun, can carry as much cargo as you need, and doesn't use much fuel at all.

Armed with your ship, you fly into the trap, the first section is a fairly easy 'zap the asteroids' stage and careful thinking with not too much over confidence can see this lot off. After this comes the main stage of the game, as the surface of the planet, looms up towards you.

In this section you have certain quotas of things to do, a certain number of aliens must be shot, lasers destroyed, and boats bombed. Aliens come in a number of different shapes and sizes, all of them are nasty, but some are more nasty than others - well, actually, most of them are more nasty than others. Once your quota of aliens has been met, no more will appear, all that is left are the fairly harmless meteors, that wander slowly down the screen. So it's a good strategy to get rid of all the aliens to start with, then you have less hassle to contend with later one.

Lasers can be destroyed by shooting their projectors on the wall, sometimes lasers appear immediately after a wall crossing our flight path, this means that you can't get them and have to smart bomb them instead - which is a shame, because you don't score anything for using a smart bomb.

Once the aliens are taken care of, the boats are no great difficulty, but you must make sure that you get everyone that you pass over. There are only usually enough boats to meet your quota, and missing one can mean you going round the course again. The technique for bombing them is to simply pull back on the stick and press fire; this can be awkward in the middle of a space battle, so be prepared to wipe out the aliens as early as possible to avoid these problems.

As well as meeting your quota there are another few things that you can do to up your score. Every now and then, a cargo ship will appear; shoot this and pick up the pod that it drops for extra points. If you have some cargo space on your ship you can store the pod. Elsewhere in the game there are little men on the ground, drop your pod onto them for an extra life and some more points.

Every so often an eye can be seen on the ground winking at you. Bomb this for more points, or if you let it drift off the screen the police are informed of your presence. Five police ships will then appear in formation; shoot all of these and you get a large bonus. Well worth the risk!

The graphics of the game show a Zaxxon-like setting with walls on either side of the screen. Every so often there are walls across the screen with small gaps in them. These can be used to great effect when eliminating aliens. When you are in the process of taking out your quota, position yourself just after one of these breaks in the wall. This means that you can zap any aliens that appear in front of you, and any that appear from behind get chewed up by your exhausts.

There are a number of things not to do in this stage. One of them is not to crash into the walls or pillars. The walls are easy to avoid, but some of the pillars are a bit more difficult as you can only tell that they're there by looking at the length of their shadow.

Running out of fuel is also a big no-no, this is more difficult to watch in some of the lesser ships as they use up fuel like it was 30p per gallon. A fuel gauge is displayed on the right hand side of the screen - watch this at all times, otherwise you get rather stuck. And the bad guys come on as fast as they possibly can.

One last thing to watch is bombing the little men - don't. If you do, a hunter killer ship will appear and smash you up, and there is no escape from this one.

After you have zapped all your aliens, eliminated all the lasers, and sunk all the boats, the border turns red and you go onto the final section. In this, your ship lands and your little man jumps out of the ship and starts his final run. In this you have to run along a sort of maze of walkways, avoiding falling down the holes. This needs some pretty tricky manoeuvring as some of the walkways can be very thin.

As well as this, you have to shoot all the horrid little aliens that come after you. This can be made easier if you remember that your bullets will bounce off the walls, and you can run and fire diagonally. So if you zig-zag and fire a lot, you can ricochet your shots all over the place and cover a fairly wide area.

You have to watch what you are doing though as you can shoot bullets off the top of the screen and accidentally shoot the orb, and doing that means re-running the whole level again. If you do this, or you simply run past the orb, then there is still a small benefit to be had. Stand at the top of the screen and keep shooting aliens indefinitely gives you 100 bonus points each - though it does get a bit boring. The advantage is that, when you get killed or you jump off the edge, you do not lose one of your precious lives - quite useful that!

With your orb, you can then get the next ship down the line. Which you will need as the next level will have more and nastier aliens and even more things to get.

Trap has one or two more interesting features in its chest and demo modes. Unfortunately I am banned from telling anybody how to access these modes (though they are fairly obvious when you think about it), but I can tell you about them (a rotter, aren't I?!).

The demo mode is a seven minute animated sequence with full music. The music is provided by the Wemusic group and the graphics are rather good and fits in with this well. The graphics show rotating planets, stars, space ship and the little man. There is also a drummer bashing away on a massive kettledrum (all in time to the music!).

It is always difficult to sum up an all-action video game. The current wave of 'thinking game', 'strategy game' and 'adventure game' snobbery is trying to make computer games into something more than what they were originally intended to be - which is just something that is challenging and enjoyable to play.

I like action games and have no shame in that. They take as much thought as the most difficult adventure game ever written - and generally that thought has to manifest itself in a couple of microseconds.

Trap fits all the criterion for an excellent action game. It's fast, challenging and long lasting - you always think that you'll get it next time, next time, next time. Whilst still being playable and winnable, Trap is certainly a winner.