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Mankind is boldly going where no-one has gone before, and, true to form, it's kicking every grubby little alien ass it comes across on the way. Rod Lawton leads the offensive.

Imagine you're piloting a highly sophisticated spacecraft. Imagine it won't go up or down. Imagine you don't have much fuel. And imagine you're the only person standing between the universe as you know it and utter destruction.

The bad guys are called Crux, and they keep building these incredibly irritating space colonies all over the moon. And the only chance you have of saving the Earth is to wipe them all out with your not-terribly-buoyant spaceship.

Actually, although it won't go up and down, it will go from side to side. And you can drop bombs on the colonies to destroy them. This is a pretty smart idea, because even though the moon doesn't have much gravity, it does have some of these buildings, you'll be dragged to the surface and turned into meat paste (meat and spaceship paste, actually).

Since there are twenty colonies to be destroyed, there are twenty levels to the game. And, not surprisingly, each one is harder than the last. To begin with, the enemies are a bit tame. They just sit in their houses, staring out of the windows (well, I would be if I was them!), waiting for you to bomb them to bits. Now and again, they loose off a surface-to-air missile, but you can tell they're not terribly serious about it.

Once you've successfully flattened a colony you get a pat on the back and another tankful of fuel. Then it's on to the next mission... until you die. But if you get good enough, of course, you will eventually finish the game.

Anything else? Oh yes, there are some collectable items, like diamonds and pearls. Very useful, yes? No, they don't give you invulnerability or extra weapons or anything like that, but they're a great hedge against inflation. Do avoid the meteors, though, because they're not too hot on the Equity market right now, and they'll wipe your spaceship out, too.

Blitz 2000 won't challenge your grey matter too much. You probably won't even need any, actually. It's all predictable, unchallenging stuff, and while it's jolly enough in its own way, it's rather like going back ten years to play some of the really early C64 stuff. The gameplay is dead simple, and the graphics are crude but effective. It'll take two minutes to pick up and another ten minutes to put down again. Sort of a tea-break game really.