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With your utility belt full, your weapons armed and your computer set on target, you attempt to stop another terrorist take over and get back in time for tea.

Star Soldier from Quicksilva looks very promising, well on the cover anyway. The cover boasts icon-control, 100 offensive missions and a sixteen-directional firing mode. Sounds good, eh? But when you load it...

The game features around two screens, one with icons to select your weaponry, rank, etc, the other is the action screen where all the killing takes place. When on your ship, you use icons to select items to put into your utility belt.

The items you can choose range from grenades and smart bombs to energy packs and dynamite, so you must choose carefully.

Once your belt is loaded, you may proceed to look for a job! You instantly find one by consulting your on-board computer and set about finding out some more about the planet in question. To do this, you must use your star map. This map can be scrolled in all directions and you can examine any planet on it with the touch of a button.

This is one thing that niggles me. If you want to find out about a planet, you must scroll all around the map, placing your square on each planet until you find the right one. This wastes time, so an option to type in the name of the planet would have been greatly received.

Now that you're all set, you can get started by pressing go. Instantly you find yourself beset by renegades, bandits, pirates or rebels depending on which mission you picked. This is where the fun starts.

You run from right to left across a scrolling screen shooting your heart out, killing lots of nasty men. You can use smart bombs and grenades here, each with the satisfying result of a few more dead villains.

You will come across walls and guns which can be destroyed by laying explosives and also extra goodies which pop up when you kill a certain baddy. You may come across shields, which give you about ten seconds of protection but they cost you energy, or pow's which give you the ability to shoot through objects.

You will eventually get to a stone wall where you will have to blast your way in, walking towards the wall whilst firing.

Just past the wall is the end of the mission, and you will be given a certain amount of credits. And, boy, are some of those planets stingy! After you have been paid, you go through the whole process again, and that's the game.

I want to know what happened to the sixteen-directional firing, which is almost impossible anyway and another thing is that on all the missions I played, I was fighting against things shaped like humans. You'd think some planets should have alien beings on them.

As for the graphics, well, you can guess what they are like with my 'Time Machine' theory, and that goes for the sound too.

This might have been a hit two years ago, but now it's just old hat.