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Maze game, nasties, zap zap zap. MEGO factor 9? (MEGO - Civil Service slang for My Eyes Glaze Over - a certain sign of boredom). No. Not even a little bit.

I can't give the game background, nor yet the names for the bits on screen, nor yet a detailed description of all the options, All that appeared for review was a disc with Anarchy scribbled on the label, and a glowing recommendation from You Know Who.

Now normally I poke halfheartedly at such an offering for a couple of minutes, fail to guess the controls, remark mildly about the weather and go onto the next game. This time I didn't put the joystick down for half an hour.

The standard opening screen is just that — standard, A couple of wandering thingurnybobs were prowling the corridors of a simple maze, the walls of which are composed out of one kind of block.

There are two other kinds of block scattered about, and there is you, a tank-like blob with a pointy bit that goes zap zap zap.

The instinctive gamesplayer immediately twigs that you hit the two non-wall kinds of blobs with the emissions of the zap zap zap device, while dodging or hitting the floating fiends. And the instinctive gamesplayer is right.

But it's the details of the game which set it apart. Firstly, there is as much firepower as you want - just hold the button down - and no messing about with refuelling or rearming. A small point, but one much appreciated.

Secondly, when you hit a nasty it just stops moving for a while; hit it some more and it gets pushed backwards a bit.

Thirdly, and by far the most important, the zap zap zapper will not work on an item in an adjacent block. To hit something, you have to have at least one blank square between it and your pointy bit. And that lends a whole new character to the game.

In the beginning it doesn't seem to matter that much. You wander around the maze, unleashing massive power on anything that takes your fancy and muttering under your breath when you have to back off a little.

Polish off a screenful of blocks, and an exit appears over which you have to stop. You then get transported to the next screen. And now it's a little difficult. There are scads of shootable blocks, but arranged so that you can only start zapping them from one or two points.

And once you're working your way through a set of blocks, the nasties can creep up behind you, with the usual results. It's difficult to describe the numerous ways in which this apparently random rule of adjacent blocks can be made to trap, twist and contort the apparently straightforward path between you and the high score.

There are cul-de-sacs where hitting an oncoming alien can trap you until it recovers and either wanders away (good) or advances once more towards you (bad).

There are vast expanses of shootable blocks that have no apparent way in. There's a time limit of one minute per screen. There's a gibbering reviewer typing as fast as he can in order to get back to the action.

Oh boy, Hewson has done it again.

The sad loss and subsequent legal meowing of two of Hewson's top programmers at the end of last year seem only to have sharpened the commercial wits of the company.

Here is a nice, simple game with nice, simple rules selling at well under the fiver which any other company would've dressed up, overpriced and oversold.

Anarchy could, if brought out three years ago in the arcades, have done very nicely indeed. As it is, we'll just have to live with a reasonably priced fun game with more unexpected complications than the Alliance merger. We'll cope.

If all the games I've described as having total "just one more game" appeal were laid end to end, they'd stretch from here to the Ed's office two floors down.

But if you dig back through some recent issues of ACU you'll see most of them are history. This is the first for a while, a game to get the adrenalin flowing and the grey matter buzzing.

What's more, it is only £2.99. A veritable bargain.

Michael Sentinella. Heard of him> No, neither had I, until Anarchy appeared. This guy is gifted. Hewson is the breaking ground for real talent.

John Pjilips is a Hewson protege, he amazed up all with Impossaball and has gone on to produe the very wondrous Nebulus.

Expect the man responsible for Anarchy to follow in his hot, hot, hot footsteps. This game could stand proud as a full pricer. Look, stop reading, go and buy it.