Ooh, this looks good! Phantasm comes in a nice shiny box with a pic of a scantily clad girly watching some alien spaceships blow up buildings. Opening the box reveals a cute little sign saying 'Do not disturb - Mission in Progress' that you can hang on your door. What a novel marketing gimmick!

Unfortunately, a much better and more reliable way to sell a lot of games is to make sure the actual game is a good one, and Exocet software obviously aren't aware of this yet. Loading the disk up reveals quite a blatant rip off of that ol' CRL classic Tau Ceti, the only difference between the two games being that Phantasm doesn't have any strategic gameplay elements, and as such is nowhere near as playable as the game it's seeking to emulate.

After entering your name and the exact time (Why???) you can select a combat zone from a neat piccy of the planet you'll be desecrating. You're then pluged straight into the game proper. You view the outside world from your cockpit window while all the information necessary to playing the game, such as fuel left, damage, compass directions and time is displayed. Outside, typically Tau Ceti-ish aliens zoom by firing at you (they look exactly like the hunter patrol craft from Tau Ceti) and these can be quickly done away with with either a burst of laser fire or a homing missile (of which you have nine). The landscape features come in the form of Beacons (mutant roadlights) and Supply Dumps, where you can refuel and arm, as well as a couple of others that look like outsize dog-jobbies (and probably are).

The ultimate aim of Phantasm is to destroy eight 'reconstitutions' dotted around the planet, but to be perfectly honest, I couldn't do any of them. Not because it's too tough (in fact, the skill levels are not much different to one another) but because the gameplay is so incredibly tedious that I gave up in sheer boredom.

As if Exocet wanted to rub salt into my already serious wounds, they've provided the lamest game scenario I've ever read in my life. Apparently you are on the run from the dreaded Poll Tax collector, and the only way to get away from him is to fall asleep and have dreams about space adventures. Then one day you are whisked off to an alien planet to wage terrible war against a bunch of mutants, where the game begins. This is not a joke, this is actually what's written on the instruction leaflet that comes with the game. Isn't it pathetic? A game with a plot that bad doesn't deserve to have a good game wasted on it, so at least Exocet have remedied that by accompanying it with Phantasm.

I suppose I'd better complete my moaning session by criticising the graphics and sound, which for the most part are pretty dull. While the static graphics on the mission selection screens and on the cockpit display are quite snazzy, the animation is very shoddy and the sprites haven't been at all well defined. The title screen and in-game music is irritating, and although you can toggle it off and just have the FX, the instructions don't tell you how to, so you have to fumble around with the keyboard until you find the right key.

So, to sum up, Phantasm is not very good at all. If you know what's good for you, you won't waste your hard-earned readies on this. Instead, you'll buy something decent like Buggy Boy or Leatherneck, won't you?