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The most immediately attractive thing about Insanity Fight is that Microdeal have made no attempt to dress mutton up as lamb. There is no novella recounting the exploits of some boring starfighter, and even the packaging is remarkably free of "the greatest game ever seen" blurbs. Simply there are a series of accurate screenshots, which do a good job of reflecting the quality of the game's graphics.

Insanity Fight is, in the truest sense of the phrase, a shoot-'em-up. The object of the game is to fly your spaceship up a vertically-scrolling bas-relief landscape, blasting everything that moves - and a great deal that doesn't. Anyone who has played the original mega-blast, Andrew Braybrook's Uridium, will immediately feel at home with Insanity Fight, although under the surface this game has a great deal more to offer.

What Insanity Fight does is take the best elements of Uridium - the graphics, speed and general blastability - and improve them, then add a few tricks of its own. As well as gawd knows how many levels, the game uses Salamander-like bonus elements to stop the game becoming too repetitive. Turbo, supershot, invisibility, mirroring, steering changes, bonuses and energy are all up for grabs if you manage to fly over the appropriate area, indicated by a strobing rainbow, of the screen.

The graphics on Insanity Fight are exactly what you would expect from a machine with the potential of the Amiga. Even the loading screen, with its excellent left-right scrolling starfields, is excellent, and as for the still pictures, and scrolling backdrops...

To capitalise on these graphics, the Swiss programming team (Linel) have used the whole screen, with only the bottom quarter reserved for the display panel, the rest being dedicated to the game. This is a refreshing change from games which use a 3" x 2" window for all animation.

As you fly along, there are various obstacles which you must either blast and/or avoid. Although these are pretty dangerous, death is generally [] bullet fire, or unintentional turbos.

The manual recommends that you map the game, but I found that it was much more simple just to learn the basis for a route, and then vary it depending on the severity of the situation you are in at the time.

To add to the excellent graphics, Insanity Fight has some of the best spot effects yet on the Amiga. Thunderous crashes, mega explosions and various other drones well and truly alive. The same cannot be said for the theme tune, which sounds like a sound sampled version of Def Leppard in a dishwasher.

What makes Insanity Fight such a good blast is both the quality of the graphics and sound, and the simplicity of the game. No blitter-driven line graphics, no quasi-3D effects, no boring storyline, just a good wholesome blast - with a few surprises (as you will find out the first time the mothership arrives!!). As with most Amiga games, it is overpriced at £24.95, but it is well worth scraping the money together if you can.