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You've joined the galactic motorway police as a patrolman. So now you're stuck on the central reservation of the M9000 with only a small spacecraft and a gun. Your job is to protect all the good ships that pass you by heroically blowing up all the baddies.

You're aided in this endevaour by two things - you've got a radar screen telling you who or what is approaching on both carriageways, and the baddies have conveniently painted their craft bright blue.

Firestar's a little like Defender since you scan the radar for any nasties to nuke. You can rotate to face either way and can move up and down the middle - all controlled with the light-gun. So, you roam up and down the middle of the traffic, blasting the blue spaceships and ignoring the orangey ones. It gets more complicated, though, because sometimes your scanner is jammed and sometimes the baddies deliberately and heinously disguise themselves as goodies.

Oh, and you gain credits for all the baddies you manage to kill and can buy better lasers and things after each wave of violence.

Firestar is speedy and smooth, and there's plenty of shooting. But the excitement soon palls because every level is pretty much the same as the last - just a bit quicker, and with more radar jamming.

There are no sub-levels and once you've worked out the strategy for killing the aliens, all you can do is keep at it until things get too fast and dangerous for you to cope with and you die. Pretty limited in the long-term.

1. Needs a Trojan light-gun.
2. No suspense or atmosphere at all, unlike Cyber Assault.
3. Roughly based on Defender, and rather repetitive - like Defender, actually.