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If you were looking to categorise Android One, I think it would probably be described as a maze game. The idea is that with the aid of five robots (Five lives to you or I), you must blast your way through fifteen screens to the nuclear generator, destroy it, then return to base.

Brick walls prevent progress and must be blasted out of the way, as must any one of the four types of aliens that are also trying to stop you. Each of the screens appear quite different and may be populated by just a few or possibly great hordes of the aliens. Your blaster does not have that great a range, so that you need to get quite close to kill an enemy - another side effect of this is that sometimes you have to blast part way through one of the wider walls then get into the gap and blast the rest of the way from there. Each of the four types of aliens act in differing ways - bouncers stick to fixed paths, but cannot be destroyed, groupies stay still most of the time, providing easy target practice, skaters race about and usually prove the most difficult to combat, the wanderers are very similar.

When first loaded, the first title screen, with the obligatory scrolling message, looks really well designed and it is hard to believe that it is only in four colours due to a nice use of stippling. The screen on which you choose keyboard or joystick has really nice graphic representations of each and the instructions are done really well in 80 columns in this 40 column mode.

However, the characters in the actual game don't appear to be quite so well thought out - they're a bit too obviously 8x8 or 8x16 defined characters, rather than the lively figures that they could have been. Although the figures are moved pixel-wise, they can only come to rest on character boundaries; consequently, it is sometimes a little difficult to line your robot up in just the right place to increase the size of a hole in a wall that you're trying to blast.

Death does seem to come a little to often and it is difficult to see how I could ever have made it to the end without the infinite lives POKE. I was hoping for some great ending on reaching the final screen, the effect was pretty good, but was it worth battling through fifteen screens for? - I think not.

In fact, once you have made it to the final screen, you just have to come all the way back to start over again, which could lose appeal very quickly. On the plus side is the fact that without the POKE, it could take you quite a while to get there. (Oh all right, POKE &6391,&937A,&939F and &93A0 with zero - but I'll leave you to work out how to get them in). As you progress the screen is scrolled to the left - a nice touch. On reaching the transporter, the current screen 'implodes' to present the next - this is a great effect. The sound leaves a lot to be desired.