The name is new but the software house isn't. Z&Z was responsible for the Arc's first shoot-'em-up, Quazer, and has now followed it up with the more strategy based Armatron.

It's little more than an arcade adventure. You control a space ship through an underground maze complex structured as a grid of adjoining caves which contain nasties such as floating hamburgers.

You must defuse timebombs and collect gold tokens. These can be exchanged for enhanced weaponry and shields. There are forcefields which can be removed by switches and turrets which fire periodically. If a cave contains a timebomb, you must get to it and touch it before the time runs out. Then a second countdown begins while you crack an 8-digit code to receive a bundle of tokens, or fail and die. This part should appeal to professional safe-crackers.

The graphics are pretty mediocre and the sounds aren't even sampled from a real spaceship! It is often difficult to tell a nasty from an artistic background.

The gameplay is quite fun. I quite enjoyed flying around bombing, laying mines and finding new passages. Ultimately you must find the alien responsible for the mess of time bombs. At this juncture you can decide whether you enjoyed his creation or not before shooting him in the belly and escaping pronto.

As the game develops, so do the puzzles, making Armatron more challenging than some games aimed at the younger generation. However, it must be said Armatron in no apparent way exploits the features of the Arc and it could have easily appeared on the Beeb. Still, BBC games can be enjoyable and Armatron can be considered as such. While not whisking anyone off their feet, the asking price of £8.95 is certainly reasonable for what it is.