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Violence isn't the answer, war is hell and nations should all be able to sit down and settle their grievances sensibly and peacefully, with a game of Battleships. Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure. But peace conferences don't exactly make for exciting gaming, do they? What you need is action. After all, if in the real world we're all being nice to each other, you need to vent your spleen somehow, what better way than with a decent fantasy shoot-'em-up? And Gladiators, you'll be glad to hear, delivers the spleen-venting goods.

You fly a helicopter along a horizontally-scrolling war zone, your aim being to blast everything in sight with your forward-facing guns. There are three different kinds of tokens to pick up. Stars will boost your score by a reasonable amount. Small green H's repair the copter, just in case you damage your craft - not exactly unheard of in a shoot-'em-up. Even smaller grey X's give you a wider firing range, that'll last until you get hit by an enemy. If you spot a blue pick-up, fire a shot at it and it'll cycle through all three - all you have to do is try to pick it up when it's the one you want. Which is easier said than done when you're under pressure.

Most of the enemies are ground-based: tanks, trains, SAM (Surface to Air Missile) sites, parked planes and gun-carrying trucks. There are also airborne enemies, but they tend to be few and far between, well fewer and further between than the land-based forces.

Unlike you, ground-based forces can fire backwards, so your priority is to shoot anything that looks like it might have a swivellable gun turret. Blast them to smithereens and you'll have a much safer passage through the war zone.

At the end of each level you run up against a heavily-armed enemy helicopter. Luckily the pilots tend to be rather predictable, so it's not that tough to reduce them copters to scrap metal. Each level has a restart point half-way through, so if the end-of-level baddie does get you, it's not a case of having to start right from the beginning again. Good news on the later levels.

When 20,000 points rolls around on your score meter, a brand new copter will be dispatched to the field for your use. From then on every extra ten grand earns another bird.

The graphical style of the game is basic but serviceable. The collision detection leaves little room for error on the pilot's part, but at least you don't have to make sure there's half a screen between you and flak to make sure you're not hit. While your automatic machine gun makes a rather high-pitched sound, the swish from the rotor blades and some dead good explosions add that little something extra in the excitement stakes.

For a shoot-'em-up, Gladiators is just fine. There's nothing more, nothing less. Good for a blast when you're fed up of puzzlers but, after all, there is more to life than death [Who d'you think you are, Jean-Paul Sartre or somebody? - Ed]

1. Constant quickfire action all the way.
2. Restart points.
3. Huge horizontally-scrolling levels.
4. Great sound effects.

1. Originality is in pretty short supply.
2. Not much variety in the gameplay.