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This is the game for someone who wants to rescue people instead of destroying them. It is based on the Vic 20 game Catchatrooper but goes much further.

You are the only hope for a number of foolish paratroopers whose landing zone is in shark-infested waters. What's more, pterodactyls appear on a marauding flight pattern, and grab the paras out of your boat and up to their doom.

The cassette is packed in a padded box, colourfully illustrated, and loading proved to be no problem.

This solo game, offers five levels of difficulty, giving sufficient range to maintain interest. You progress through the levels of difficulty automatically.

You lose one of your six lives for each man eaten by sharks, or take by pterodactyls. Each man saved gains points. The use of colour is very good and sprites are liberally involved to provide fast action. There is a clever use of sound to add to the enjoyment.

The helicopter flies over dropping paras, in twos and threes, and making a realistic engine noise. The paras weave from side to side, which requires swift work on your part with the joystick, as if you get your rowing boat under a para and catch him, you score.

If you miss you have a second chance, because you put a net over the gunwales. You must act pretty quickly to beat the sharks to the para. The sharks have a remarkable turn of speed, especially at the higher levels of difficulty. It you achieve a new high score, the machine responds with a rendering of Michael, Row The Boat Ashore. The high-resolution graphics are very well done indeed.

One criticism is that the higher levels of difficulty only offer more of the same, only faster, rather than a variety of scenes.

The game offers excellent high-speed joystick response, and realistic graphics.

The animation is very smooth indeed, however, it is repetitious, and does not offer enough variety for lasting appeal. It would have been improved by the addition of new marauders in place of the pterodactyls, in the later stages, preferably with different behaviour patterns.

More the sort of game to show off the capabilities of your machine, than to play for months.