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The year is 2488, Ball Raider is the ultimate challenge for the "Guild of Warriors", it says on the packaging. I have news for Diamond Games: it was also the ultimate challenge for a lot of arcade visitors fourteen years ago. For Ball Raider turns out to be nothing more or less than that hardy perennial BreakOut in one of its many disguises.

There's a lot of BreakOut about on the Amiga these days. First there was Impact, then Arkanoid appeared, courtesy of Discovery Software, and now we have Ball Raider.

Ball Raider doesn't have a great deal to commend it over the others. A bit on graphics, with the use of background stills to the playing area depicting sci-fi style tableaux of alien-crushing and galactic exploration. Then the high score table is produced by a muscle-bound Greek God type, who grinds his teeth and flashed his eyes as the high scores fade in and out in fetching dark blue. Or, for some reason, in red if you keep the fire button pressed.

You might want to keep the fire button pressed as well because you are irritatingly forced to enter your name after every single game, and view the high scores, whether you make it to the table or not, and holding on the Fire speeds through it as quickly as possible.

As for the gameplay, well, it's BreakOut over 25 screens. Sometimes the ball goes fast, sometimes it goes slow, sometimes you get an extra life, sometimes an interesting grey vertical stripe appears on the right-hand side of the screen and obliterates the score and lives left table. I haven't seen this feature in BreakOut before, and I suspect that Diamond Games missed it when they were bug-hunting as well. Other stripes also appear on screen from time to time and although they don't interfere with gameplay, they are of equal curiosity value.

The sound effects amount to clunks for hitting the bricks and whooshes for bouncing them off your bat. These are in addition to the background music, which although not objectionable, is extremely repetitive.

Ball Raider doesn't have anything like the number of extra features which made Impact and Arkanoid such interesting variants on a very old game format. For die-hard BreakOut collectors only.