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I wondered whether this game should have an 18 cerificate rating. Whether innocent minds should be exposed to the proclamation 'Penentrate, Dominate, Conquer'. It sounds a little rude, to say the least. Well, in the cause of ACU, I got out the PVC boots, the rubber mask and snorkel, and the buttered toast, but it was not like that.

Dominator is all about an ageing fighter pilot - the last real pilot and the advancing threat from outer space. Roll of the drums and off we go into vertically-scrolling shooting, with sideways scrolling on the next phase.

The combination of game styles is becoming the fashion but I have to say the vertical part fails completely to provide a reasonable arcade gaming experience.

There is this thing eating everything in its path and you have to penetrate to its centre and shoot the living daylights out of it. There are bonus discs along the way, endowing extra weaponry, extra lives, points bonus, smart bombs and a cheat mode.

It does not help you overlook the fact that the scrolling is fairly slow and, unbelievably, your spaceship moves one block at a time laterally - and slowly vertically - making sharp manoeuvring a virtual impossibility.

Thankfully the designers have measured the gap where the screen narrows to unfeasible tightness and your ship will go through with virtually nothing to spare.

The other problem is that you are playing on a reduced vertical screen so you do not have much chance to see things coming. The whole section plays like a pig - one with its feet stuck in a foot of mud at that.

The horizontal sections are more playable, more entertaining but more difficult without being abnormally so. The scrolling is not too fast or smooth but you are getting real Amstrad multi-coloured graphics instead of Spectrum two - coloured blobs, so hurrah for that.

Although the first part looks as if you are through the inside of something's stomach, other screens are more hi-tech looking, with metallic pipes and steel walls everywhere - at least you can see what is corning before it hits you.

Adequate just about sums up this one. The declaration: "Its vast appetite was closing in on Earth and the putrid smell of partly-digested nations hung ominously in space", might make it sound like an entertaining B-movie-style epic but I am afraid this is distinctly TV movie class.