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This has almost everything a great shoot-'em-up could want. It has great graphics, revolutionary even. Tony Crowther has been very clever in managed to get 32 colours out of a 16 colour machine. It has loads of levels, each of them containing three different screens, and all played against different backdrops.

It has an original scenario, yet based around an idea so obvious, you wonder why it takes such a cleverbonce as John Cook to think of it. If you hadn't already guessed, Phobia lets you fight your own worst enemy - your phobia. That, and fourteen other popular and enjoyable stomach tremblers including hydrophobia (Fear of water), ornaphobia (Fear of birds), and Pattendenophobia (Fear of submitting a review late).

The game starts by dropping you right in the deep end with a level-load of creepy-crawlies. Spiders, flies and bees all race around, making webs, flying and firing bullets.

The first thing you notice is how pitiful your ship is. It moves slowly, and it has an appalling rate of fire. This is corrected by shooting key nasties, who leave behind them little rocket packs. The first two speed up both the ship and its rate of fire. The third gives you a weak bomb, which, acting along the same lines as the missiles in Nemesis, falls and then runs along the ground. After that, the next ten or so increase the power of your shots. Finally, after you have collected billions of them, your ship starts flashing. You are now in weird mode. What you would expect to happen now is that you would get a shield. But no. For some strange reason, the enemy stop firing at you. You can still crash into them; but they stop shooting until the flashing wears off (which can be easily topped up by getting more pods).

Each level has an end-of-level guardian, of course. But you can't get to the end-of-level guardian unless you have opened the door to the end of the level. To do this, you have to shoot all the tokens on each level. This removes the energy barrier blocking the exit and gives you a crack at the big guy.

At other points in the game, you can buy multiples, as in Salamander and Nemesis. Indeed, I can't help but think that perhaps Messrs Crowther, Bishop and Cook got just a little bit of inspiration from Salamander for their gameplay. The last section to each planet is similar to a second section from one of the aforementioned games.

As I've mentioned before, the graphics are quite good, apart from the odd sprite glitch or three. The use of colour is amazing, I'd be made to say it isn't, but probably the most suspect thing is the parallax scrolling. It seems to have no focus point, which means that you only get a row of scrolling stripes that give no impression of distance. If anything, it gives the impression of the distant stripes actually scrolling in the opposite direction to the way they're supposed to scroll. Bad planning.

The sound offers nothing new. Spot effects for explosions and bullets etc, though I was surprised at the lack of a title or in-game tune.

The gameplay isn't what it might have been. I find it constantly frustrating that, even now, there are relatively few C64 shoot-'em-ups that can satisfy my craving for blood! Come on, the C64 is a shoot-'em-up programmer's dream machine. It was born to scroll, so let's see its capabilities used.

Phobia is a game that nearly was. A lot of innovation based on top of a sure fire tried-and-tested system and look what happens. Sloppy gameplay and bang goes another dream.