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Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it's Astro-Droid, the latest release from Red Rat Software. You take on the role of a $200,000,000 machine of destruction, a cyborg, a machine with a human brain - an insane one at that.

You are first presented with an impressive title screen. When the rest of the program loads, this changes to a 3D scrolling starfield, with a prompt to press the fire button to start.

Playing in the background is a catchy tune that suits the game's mood very well. This continues to play all the way through the game.

When you press the fire button, you enter the Median Sector and go single-handedly into battle against the evil Reldans to force them back to their own galaxy.

You do this by flying over their 50 mile long neutron-powered starships blasting away at their positronic laser batteries and destroying enemy fighters that attempt to crash kamikaze-style into you.

After you have inflicted enough damage to their craft you move to a bonus level which involves avoiding fighters in deep space. Once the fighters have been destroyed, you progress to another space sector with yet another starship to obliterate.

The first impression is good - the screen scrolls very smoothly, the fighters appear and attempt to dive bomb you. However, after I had been playing a while it began to remind me of Screaming Wings, an earlier Red Rat game. Fighters fly at you in a similar way, even the way your droid moves around the screen.

This does not detract from the skillful content of the game - the fighters are very hard to shoot, and the wreckage can destroy you if you are not fast enough.

Dotted along the starship are different letters. If you shoot at a letter C you cause your droid to turn into an invisible attack ship, but this transformation only lasts for a limited time.

The time remaining is displayed at the bottom of the screen. If you look closely at the starship the letter XL appear frequently - a nice touch.

This is a one-player game using the joystick in port one. In certain parts of the game you are required to move your droid to the left or right of the screen to indicate if you wish to fly above or below the starships.

The scoring system is easy; and you gain points for blasting the fighters, with bonus points awarded for hitting special targets and for surviving the deep space section.

There are many nice features, such as the ability to fly on either side of the starships. Visible through the ships is a very nicely scrolled starfield which gives the impression of depth.

The way that your droid transforms into the sleek attack ship is smoothly done and does not interfere with the screen's scrolling.

My only quibble lies with the instructions, which are very short and contain an error when telling you how to load the disc version. They indicate that you hold Start and Option keys when powering up your machine. In fact, you only hold Option to deselect Basic.

Apart from this, I was very impressed with thie game, and if you like to see your enemy vanish in a hail of laser fire this is the one for you.