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Those TV reptiles with a taste for rodents are out to conquer the earth

Good grief! Just when we all thought we'd seen the last of V, the show that made Blake's 7 look like Hamlet, Ocean go and turn it into a computer game. The computerised V is nowhere near as hilarious as the original TV series, but despite the limitations of the Spectrum's graphics, the animated character in the game is far less wooden than any of the actors in the series.

As in the original, the hero of the piece is Donovan, who once more has to singlehandedly take on an entire race of lizard-creatures and prevent them from having their wicked way with our planet. This time around, Donovan has managed to sneak his way aboard the aliens' Mother Ship and is attempting to destroy it by placing explosives at five key points on the ship - the Water Inlet, Air Purification Plant, Nuclear Reactor, Central Computer and Docking Bay.

The Mother Ship is an enormous maze full of corridors arranged in five sections, and each section is made up of four floors which in turn are some eighteen screens wide. you can pass from one part of the ship to another by using the Beamer Pads and doorways which are scattered through the corridors, but because the ship is so large it might be a good idea to make a note of some of the more important locations as you come across them so that you can find them again if you need to.

The aliens' leader, Diana, has discovered that Donovan is on board and has set loose hordes of security robots to track him down. These come in four types, but all deliver a nasty electric shock which can put a strain on Donovan's heart and eventually kill him. But to even the scales a little, he is armed with a rechargeable laser and can do some nimble somersaulting over some of the robots to avoid coming into contact with them.

Graphically, the game bears quite a resemblance to Impossible Mission, particularly in the leaping motion of the main character and the wandering robots. The upper two thirds of the screen show the interior of the ship, with an impressively detailed side view of the corridors on two levels. The remainder of the screen shows the energy level of Donovan's laser, the condition of his heart and oxygen levels.

The remainder of the screen provides information about the energy level of Donovan's laser, his heart beat and oxygen levels, as well as showing the display of Donovan's Communiputer. This is an icon-driven device (again, similar to the one in Impossible Mission) which gives details of Donovan's location, the location of some of his main targets, and also enables him to try and break the security codes on the doors to these areas.

Unfortunately the instructions on the cassette inlay are so brief that they don't really give you an idea of how to use the communiputer or even of how to find and use the explosives that you're going to need. I'm afraid that there's an awful lot in this game that the instructions just don't help you with at all, such as the code-breaking sequences: these use a system of numbers and symbols based on the number six (as the aliens have six fingers on each hand, thought logically that should give them a number system based on twelve, not six) which is obviously going to be quite tricky to work out, but the instructions don't even mention this aspect of the game, let alone give any idea of how to go about it!!

V is a large and complex game, and just for once the game more than lives up to the original ideas that inspired it (Mind you, the TV series wasn't a particularly hard act to follow, was it?) And as long as you're prepared to go through a lot of trial and error to find out all the things that the instructions don't bother to tell you about, then it should provide an enjoyable challange that will take some time to solve.