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RISK puts you in charge of a Surface Skimmer which is, in fact, a highly manoeuvrable space vehicle, designed to zap various aliens who have invaded the surface of the planet Christon 3.

The planet Christon is the site for a vital Space Weapons Research Establishment. When the scientists there found out about the alien invasion they stupidly left their underground base, called the Tube, and are now wandering around in a severely distressed state on the planet's surface.

Your job is not just to pick up as many distressed/working-out scientists as you can, but to rid each of the planet's sectors of aliens. So there you have it, a game that rivals a Bob Monkhouse joke for originality.

Despite all that, RISK is a pretty good game. It's a two-way scrolling affair, with two speeds for foreground and background. Your skimmer can fly or travel along the planet surface in either direction. Since it is subject to gravity, not pushing the joystick up makes the craft bump heavily onto the ground. This, not surprisingly, does it no favours and makes the Damagemeter go down. Taking shots from aliens and crashing into them also has the same effect.

There are about twenty sectors to complete, each spanning out from the homebase, which you see in the middle of the map. Sectors don't have to be taken in strict order, the only stipulation is that you choose one adjacent to the one just completed.

How do you complete a sector? Firstly you must dispose of all the aliens (the number to zap is given on the right hand side of the screen). Then you must find one of two gaps in the planet surface. The first takes you to the Workshop (more of that later) whilst the second leads down to The Tube.

You must enter the Tube underneath each sector or that sector is not completed. When you get there, you find yourself whizzing along at auto-speed past three platforms. You must try to land on one of these. The three platforms in The Tube hold the key to this game and need a little explaining. They're also very difficult to land on successfully.

Landing on one of the platforms gives you a choice of stocking up on more ammo, spare parts for your craft or blueprints. All three of these come in handy in the Workshop.

The Workshop is where you customise and repair your ship and you can get there, providing you find the gap in the surface, at any time during your alien zapping. Various icons in the workshop let you repair damage, add more ammo and customise your ship with more weapons and shields.

This is where the scientists and blueprints come in. You can't add more weaponry unless you've picked up enough scientists on the surface and enough blueprints in The Tube for them to get to work. Without them, you're stuck with the basic ship and basic cannon-fire.

Now for the aliens. These come in all shapes and sizes, the basic variety being blokes with jetpacks hovering around in the air. There are also blokes on what look like floating motor scooters, blokes on the surface in bubble cars, jetpack riders with wings, things that walk on the surface, etc. Each sector expands on this alien assortment.

But the nasties aren't stupid: the jetpackers fly both ways, hover up and down, dive bomb and generally dodge your clumsy attempts to zap them - clumsy because gravity makes your craft that bit more difficult to control. The further you get from homebase, the more fierce and furious it all becomes. To help you, there's a radar display at the top of the screen and the occasional appearance of supply pods for the mothership, containing more parts, more ammo or damage repair depending on their colour.

While dots on the radar screen are scientists. It's useful to keep an eye on these since scientists can be accidentally zapped or run over by your ship.

I have two major criticisms of RISK. Firstly, there's just not enough variety of scenery on each of the sectors of the planet's surface. On top of that, the scenery elements repeat themselves much too often as they scroll past. This is curious because the opening screen is graphically very impressive.

Secondly, RISK just isn't original enough. It's well presented and a sufficiently tough challenge but the scenery, the gameplay and the objectives are remarkably like too many sideways scrolling shoot-'em-ups already destined for the Oxfam shop.