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Julian Gollop may not be a name easily recognised by many C64 owners, but his games certainly are. Rebelstar Raiders (Recently given a new lease of life as Rebelstar, from Firebird), Chaos from Games Workshop, and the soon-to-appear Rebelstar 2 have all been brilliant.

In the broadest sense possible, Laser Squad is a war-game, but on a very small scale. To explain Laser Squad, I'll take you through the first scenario, naively titled 'The Assassins'. Player one takes control of the Assassin Squad. The Assassins have to kill a gentleman by the name of Sterner Regnix, boss of an illegal drugs ring. He is played by player two, if there is one; otherwise the computer takes control of Sterner himself inside his private home on the planet CX-1, where is guarded by some particularly tough robot guards.

The first thing you have to do is arm your characters. You begin the arming section with a specific amount of credits, and with these you have to buy armour and weapons of different strengths. Then, as with most other games that fit into the genre, you have to deploy. The assassins deploy outside the house, and Sterner deploys inside.

The game is controlled via a series of menus and a cursor. The cursor is used to scroll around the large, well detailed map. Find one of your units, press fire and the first menu comes up. One thing to point out is that the menus will only display options you can select. The option to unlock the door, for example, won't appear unless you have the correct key and are standing in front of a locked door.

Click on the word SELECT and you gain control over the currently selected character. Pressing fire brings up a sub-menu that contains options such as Fire, End Move and Change. Change handles all the object manipulations, End Move relinquishes control of that character and Fire goes into combat mode. When in firing mode, the screen displays changes. All destructible items are represented as circles and walls are presented a lines. Position the cursor over what you want to shoot, select weaponry and press fire.

Graphically, Laser Squad is nothing to write home about, but there's plenty of detail. Objects adorn the entire map and really put it a cut-and-a-half above the rest. All moveable objects are animated, though curiously enough the main characters aren't. Colour has been used well, but the use of single colour sprites a little disappointing.

The sound is great. The droning effect when a scanner is switched on is really nice, as are most of the laser effects.

There are billions of subtleties contained in Laser Squad. All I can say to round the review off sensibly is that Laser Squad is one of the best games ever to appear. It doesn't match up to a product like Elite but it's not far off.