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Just what do the guys at Electric Dreams think they're playing at?

Look, it's 1987 now. The world and his wife are communicating with carphones and filofaxes, satellite TV is just around the corner, and computer games have attained previously undreamt-of sophisication and excellence. And what does Electric Dreams do? It releases a Galaxians-type vertically scrolling space shoot-'em-up. Is anyone going to part with the folding stuff for that?

You bet your life they will.

Firetrack is arcade fare, pure and simple. And, like all the best arcade games, the plot is superfluous. In the 22nd century, the pirate mining colonies of the Asteroid belt have rebelled against Earth, and are now happily trading amongst themselves along a route known as the Firetrack.

Earth doesn't exactly welcome such pirate enterprise, ad despatches a fleet of three Hatchfighters to shoot up the colony worlds in a fit of gunboat diplomacy.

You're a crack Hatchfighter pilot who gets to blast the britches off everything that moves. In essence that means destroy the '+' and 'X' symbols on the ground, while avoiding or killing the waves of enemy aircraft which descend towards you.

Game controls are even simpler. Just up, down, left and right. You don't even have to press the fire button, as your Hatchfighters fire continuously, ever running short of ammo. (If you do press fire, you get rapid firing, which isn't really needed for the early stages.) All you have to worry about is moving fast enough to save your skin and score as many points as possible. And that's one of the reasons why the game is so damn good.

There are eight colony worlds in all, separated from each other by stretches of junk-littered space called CommSpace, and only two of these worlds are uninhabited. The first colony is Cygni, a Baseworld, with all its little panels and knobbly bits picked out with shadows. The slight suggestion of 3D is enhanced by the shadows which your craft and the enemy ships cast on the landscape below.

Cygni is candy. Most of the pirate ships keep to the centre of the screen, in formation, so it's possible to hug the left-hand side and avoid them entirely.

Towards the end of this colony - as with all the others - you suddenly come across an accumulation of '?'s, which shield the computer centre. Plugging more than ten of these gets you an extra life in the form of a Hatchfighter, in the next section. Finally, there are the two nuclear power plants, looking like eyes on the curiously shaped 'devil rock'. Blast these and the colony is plunged into darkness, whereupon you get to strafe the whole thing all over again, before passing into CommSpace. If you escape from CommSpace, you get another Hatchfighter (or two if you're already down to your last craft). Delan, the Dustworld, is next.

Delan isn't candy at all, because in addition to all the other pirate ships, you've now got to sidestep the odd floating missile homing in on you. If you get through Delan (twice, again with the lights out) and through CommSpace, you can have a brief holiday on Shail, an Iceworld of snowy plains and frozen mountains, and uninhabited. Unopposed, you should be able to gain an extra Hatchfighter here, before wading into CommSpace again, and then onto Tesla, the Mallworld.

The first three colony worlds - Cygni, Delan and Shail, can each be accessed directly by the keyboard, so you can go straight on to Shail if you want. Another attractive feature of Firetrack is that once you're dead, you don't return to the start of the game, but to the beginning of the section which you've reached, with all your bonus lives intact. Once you've got to Tesla, for instance, you need never return to the earlier worlds for as long as you keep your C64 switched on.

Instantly addictive, fast and hectic to play, and probably impossible to complete, Firetrack is a welcome relief from all the strategic arcade-adventure combat simulations around. You wouldn't want to play it for the rest of your life, but there's nothing wrong with the occasional bit of head-banging every now and again, is there?