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Four months of attacking aliens have taken their toll - they've pinched all of your weapons and destroyed what they couldn't carry. To make things worse all of your soldier chums have lost their bottle and bolted for it. So there you are, on your own, aliens galore, your own weapons being used against you, with only your trusty machine gun and five lives tucked under your belt.

All of this is just an excuse for a Commando rip off. Mastertronic are well known for ripping off arcade games with good results, maybe that's why they're starting a new arcade label. Somehow I don't think they were going to pull it off this time because I spotted the name Richard Clark, author of the incredibly powerful sleeping drug game Trizons.

A press of the fire button lands you right in the middle of the action, blimey, you think, where is everyone? As a few carbon copies of my man came out of nowhere and shot my nut off. After this, I got the message. I was the green character, the aliens were the blues. There are five levels in this game but it is incredibly hard, as I charged up the screen aliens popped up in my way and I kept on running up their rear, seasoned gamers should know that doing such a thing is lethal.

After a while you notice that the best approach is to work your way up the screen slowly blasting any stray aliens. On the way I saw some nice ideas for obstruction like gates, pulsing electric fences and some bouncing UFOs. There were, of course, the usual hazards to be overcome like boulders, ponds, stumps of grass and dog mess done near the vacant buildings.

The graphics are nicely defined and move about smoothly but unfortunately have those dirty big sprite blocks surrounding each character. The colours chosen look great in colour but bits of your man disappear in black and white.

The sound is low and I don't just mean in quality, this programmer must have bad hearing to use such low frequencies only. But as the saying goes, poor sound is better than no sound - it goes with action well enough.

The gameplay is good but being limited to four directional control was a bit confusing at times. It is hard to get into and you'll get very frustrated when you can't even go a few centimetres up the screen - which scrolls very smoothly.

Do I like it? Yes. Congrats to Richard, this is the best Commando clone out on the market and I've seen them all (and played them as well).