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As you'll have gathered from the title, this is the long awaited follow-up to the very successful Beach Head. And for the money, this is better than the original.

Subtitled The Dictator Strikes Back!, it is a two-player game with your opponent being either another player or the computer. Against the computer, it doesn't matter which side you play, for the computer will control the other.

Like its predecessor, Beach Head II has four distinct sequences. The first, Attack, is probably the best. In it the Allies drop troops from a helicopter ready to begin the assault against the Dictator's stronghold.

The troops have to be parachuted evenly behind a four-section rear wall from which they must advance down the screen for a two-section wall.

From here they scramble towards the door of the enemy's lair and out of reach of the machine gun which all the time has been rat-a-tat-tating away at them leaving a pockmarked battlefield.

Men can be sent over the wall as a diversion and grenades can be hurled at the gun, but the ultimate objective is to get at least one man to the door.

In Rescue, escaping hostages have to flee across an open courtyard. The Dictator has four methods of stopping them - dropping stones from a wall, placing mines from trapdoors hidden in the courtyard, and sending out tanks and rocket-launching trucks. The Allies try to fend off all these attacks with a captured machine gun.

Escape has the hostages up in a helicopter which is under attack from the Dictator. Graphically this is the weakest of the four scenarios, though are still pretty exciting to play.

The final sequence Battle has the Dictator (the Dragon) and the head of the Allies (J.P. Stryker) facing each other in a head-to-head across an underground river.

Perched on long platforms, the two hurl poontas (sharpened wooden sticks, it says here) at each other for several rounds.

The throws can be straight or curved and small speech bubbles appear to let you know the rivals' innermost thoughts.

First one to get implated with four poontas is a sissy and falls off the platform and into the river.

There is an option to practice any screen and an automatic demo mode to show you how it should be done.

I missed the speech synthesis of the Commodore 64 version but even so, this is still a superb game.

The animated action and use of sound are a treat. The game offers bags of thrills and spills and is one of the best releases for the Atari this year. Not to be missed.