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Criminals have a pretty good time of it in the future. As serious crime starts to get out of control, the Government passes Resolution 101, which allows convicted felons to be pardoned if they can terminate another major bad guy who's still at loose on the streets. To help out, the authorities kindly supply an armed hover skimmer, and allow the 'little' crims to keep any money they manage to steal from the 'big' crims and spend it on improvements to their craft and weaponry. Sounds like great fun to me.

You play one of these 'little' crims, and your aim is to zoom around a minimalistic 3D landscape (I seem to be using that phrase a lot this month), zapping lesser baddies until you've collected enough 'evidence' to go after the 'big' crim of that level (there are twelve levels). Gameplay-wise we're in straightforward shoot-'em-up territory, but where this scores over the similar Thunderstrike is that it's fast, fairly liberally spread with zapping action, and very atmospheric. Atmosphere comes from the basic but effective cityscape (complete with roads, rivers, etc), the way the sky lightens and darkens through each 'day', the lightning strikes which announce the materialisation of enemies and the generally futuristic and just slightly abstract feel of things.

The biggest drawback is that it does get pretty repetitive pretty quickly, but it's sufficiently exciting beforehand to mean that you'll always enjoy picking it up for a quick blast now and again, and that's always okay by me.

Fast and groovy shoot-'em-up with lots of top-quality baddie-battling action, if very little in the way of depth. An arcade game, would you believe?