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Dungeons Raiders is a treasure collect-'em-up maze game with a unique concept, written in AGD by the creator of CyberMania, Sorceress and Sorceress 2: The Mystic Forest. In fact this is the third game in the saga of the witches and the Dark Lord after the Sorceress games.

For years, the necromancer Skulvort has commanded his minions to loot the land surrounding his dungeon fortress. Four adventurers plan to infiltrate the fortress, claim the loot back and destroy Skulvort once and for all. Three of the adventurers, one of which looks very familiar, set off for the dungeons whilst a fourth, a powerful wizard named Zpectru, uses his magic from afar to guide the adventurers in their quest for treasure and protect them from the underground minions within the fortress. You play the part of Zpectru the wizard and control the Eye of Force, which is a fancy, fantasy name for a crosshair. If you move it to a point in the maze and press fire your fellow trio of adventurers will head towards that spot. Any minions that you pass the crosshair over will either be destroyed or temporarily frozen. Even the destroyed minions waste little time in regenerating so chaos ensues on every level of the game.

From the title screen, you just press enter to start. Controls for the Eye of Force are up (Q), down (A), left (O), right (O) and fire (Space). There are twenty levels to pillage and 60 items of treasure over all the levels in total. Grabbing all three treasures on a single level will lead you to the next. Once all 60 are collected the Necromancer will be defeated. Your fellow adventurer good guys are always yellow in colour. But even so, keeping track of the number of different characters on screen may be a little overwhelming for some. This may even be the Lunar Jetman of homebrew games. For me it was a wonderful challenge to keep my eyes on the good guys, bad guys, the traps and the treasure. There's a lot going on but if there wasn't the game would be far too easy.

Your colleagues are sometimes a bit dumb in not using the quickest or even the correct path to a treasure you may have highlighted. For me this added to the games charm and character. I was constantly shouting and cursing at the idiots as they bungled around each level. Failure was always their stupid fault. However, I was genuinely gutted every time one of them kicked the bucket leading to the appearance of a little tombstone and me getting more than a little game rage. What calmed me down a bit and makes no sense at all is that any adventurer missing from the trio is resurrected at the beginning of each level. Happy days!! The graphics are similar to the developers previous efforts. I particularly like the characters for both of the adventurers and the minions in this one. The audio is noisy as hell, especially on the title screen, and more than a little grating, but it does add to the whole hectic atmosphere of the game.

The Eye of Force mechanic is a brave departure from the common place mechanics of the developers previous efforts and I'm very happy to report that it works extremely well. The gameplay is intense and has a proper 1980's arcade game feel to it, which I love.

That "music" is actually enough to drive anyone insane in the membrane, insane in the brain.

This is one of my favourite ZX Spectrum homebrew games to appear this year. It really harks back to the old days of the pure arcade adrenaline rush I used to experience back in the early 80's, only this time at home on my living room sofa.