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This is one of those games which takes traditional arcade elements - aliens, robots, lasers, pods - and pares them down to the bare bones. All that's left is the strategic gameplay, which either makes or breaks it, depending on your taste.

If the graphics were any more minimalist you'd be watching a blank screen - possibly a more rewarding exercise. The aliens look like doughnuts, the pods are little squares, the laser bolts are black dots, and the scrolling landscape is a grid. The robot you control is another doughbut, without the hole. None of yet giant sprites and 3D perspective stuff here, mate.

What you have to do is pick up the pods in the correct order and deposit them at the oval assembly unit. There are four pods to each corridor, and if they're out of sequence, then the unit rejects them and they're sent back to where they came from.

The aliens are about as troublesome as they're exciting to look at, but they do decrease your energy levels if you run into them. They can be despatched by firing bolts at them, and, according to the instructions, the resulting 'explosion' (there isn't one) boosts your energy. Not when I played it, it didn't. The bolts can be fired in the direction you're facing, including diagonally, and then proceed to happily ricochet off walls forever, or until you fire another one.

That's about it, really. Once you've figured out the correct sequence of pods, then it's not so much a question of strategy as a case of expert joystick manipulation as you negotiate the horribly flickering maze to reach the assembly unit before your energy is consumed. Presumably later levels are more difficult, but will you be bothered to find out?

A real throwback to the early days of computer software, when a dollar sign being chased by an asterisk was the acme of sophisticated graphics, Robobolt is painful to watch and boring to play. Avoid.