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Ho hum. You know the kind of thing. Despotic civilisation steals fabulous treasure, buries the same deep within a forbidding planet protected by fiendish and terrible defences, then disappears forever. Millennia later, courageous lone hero defeats all-comers to prise the treasure from eternity's grasp, which, as we all know, is remorseless.

As Captain C.I. Cobra you have to manoeuvre your Marauder battlecar through a number of zones, destroying as many defensive systems as you can while dodging the combined venom of Atomic disruptors, deadly winder missiles and low-tech Molotov cocktails. You are armed with a laser cannon and three smart bombs. These destroy all enemy weapons on the screen. As you progress you will find a number of defence beacons, which are just waiting to be wiped out.

These change colour rapidly and, when hit, can help or hinder you depending on their colour. Hitting a blue beacon brings about the most fiendish complication of all: A reversal of all controls for ten seconds. This is difficult enough to cope with at the best of times and is a killer if you happen to be engaged in fighting off a number of missile-firing drones.

The defence systems become more determined as you progress, and throw everything they've got at you when you reach the end of each zone.

It is addictive: You are constantly involved in a juggling act, balancing short term survival against long-term viability. Do you use all weapons at your disposal to progress to the next level and risk leaving yourself defenceless? It can pay to gamble, but lose and you will quickly find yourself back where you started.

The game is colourful, yet does not suffer from being played on a green monitor. Losing the effect of the coloured beacons does not cause a problem - they change so fast that destroying one is always a gamble whether or not you can see the colours.

Marauder features the standard action game scenario, but is lifted out of the ordinary into the "can't put down the joystick" league by some imaginative programming.

Marauder passes the "just one more go" test with flying colours. I soon found myself trapped, determined to get further into each zone than I had the last time.

You've no idea how frustrating it can be to get to an area you've been trying to reach for ages, only to find yourself speeding backwards into the path of an oncoming missile because you've destroyed one beacon too many at just the wrong moment.