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Cockroaches from beyond Sirius! The newspaper headlines read like ads for Hollywood's latest trash SF holo-movie, but the threat of mankind's destruction is far from amusing. Earth's governments have set up the Warhead Project to recruit and train pilots to defend the solar system from encroaching swarms of insectoid starfighters.

And so here you are, suited up and strapped into the acceleration couch of your FOE-57 attack ship, waiting for the launch order from Solbase. The first missions are educational, instructing you in docking and other basic flight skills and it's only after those are successfully mastered that you're sent on combat and reconnaissance duty.

After receiving mission orders, the FOE-57 is automatically armed for that mission. You then launch from Solbase, select your destination planet or star on the navigation computer's chart, and engage the Quadspace engines to flip the ship across the void.

The FOE-57's armament depends on the mission, but normally its main weapons are a set of Stinger homing missiles, and better weapons become available as the game progresses. For reconnaissance missions, the ship is armed with data gathering probe missiles which transmit information back to the ship's computer for reference.

Other space travellers are a further source of information, and their transmissions seem to suggest that there is an even greater menace roaming the galaxy than the Roaches...

I've been a big fan of simulated space combat ever since Elite, and though always keen to boldly go where no man has gone before, I've often been disappointed by games which try to be "Elite with extra bits". Warhead is Elite with most of the shooting and none of the trading, and the action is spread over 39 missions compared with Elite's five.

The sockpit and space station graphics are excellent, as are the ship's computer displays - playing around with the 3D galactic maps is like watching one of NASA's Voyager mission films. Having said that, the 3D ship models are an unelegant bunch, and look about as spaceworthy as your average paper dart.

The other fly in the ointment is the amount of time it takes to get accustomed to the control system. Learning the keyboard commands isn't so bad, but the mouse control is difficult to gauge, so a nudge too far can leave the FOE-57 rolling out of control, and the "speed dots" which indicate your velocity just become a spiralling blur, making it difficult to recover control.

The lure of the missions make it worth persevering though, and snippets of information picked up in the later sorties lead you into the next ones, so you just have to keep going till the final menace is destroyed and the galaxy is once again safe for children and small furry animals.