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If you can keep six balls in the air while simultaneously playing the piano, this is the game for you. There are just too many keys to operate in Free Fall. It is a pity - because the basic idea is a good one.

A nearly-drawn little astronaut floats about inside Deep Space Station Coriolis, under attack from four different sorts of lobster-like creatures. You have to manipulate its arms and legs to kick and punch these creatures into oblivion. The game should feel like a mugger's night out.

Unfortunately, to keep things in proportion, whoever wrote the graphics to this game wrote in the most flimsy little movements of arms and legs to represent kicks and punches. Instead of delivering a roundhouse kick to the delicate parts, the astronaut barely twitches a toe. Sometimes this seems to be effective, sometimes not. It's hardly the sort of thing to keep the crowds on the edges of their seats.

As if to make up for this lack of graphic violence, in what is after all an extremely violent idea, the sound effects are deafening. And there is no way of dimming down the sound, short of putting a telephone directory over the speaker.

You have three rockets on the astronaut's suit which control movement, but firing them nearly ruptures the eardrums. The one really satisfying noise in this game comes when you drive the astronaut at full thrust into one of the walls of the space station. The result is a concussed astronaut and a loud, reverberating 'boing'.

That sound occurs frequently during play. The keys which activate the left and right rockets are both right next to the keys which cause the left and right arms to punch. So what inevitably happens is that, having manoeuvred the astronaut with care through the curved space of the station right to the point where you are about to cripple a lobsteroid, the right finger hits the wrong key and your man ends up comatose, bouncing off the space station wall.

Another point of difficulty is that some of the lobsteroids, waspoids, batoids and other oids appearing in the space station can paralyze your astronaut. You find this out when your controls go dead, which they do from time to time.

I wasn't sure that this wasn't simply a marvellous way Acornsoft had dreamed up of disguising bugs in its program. A major plus point, though, is the very full instruction booklet that comes with Free Fall. In fact it's almost a great game.