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The packaging tempts you to "travel through the star maze to discover rare jewels and transport them back to the mothership". Not too inspiring. Already I had visions of a hundred other similar games and sure enough, this one was no exception.

According to the literature, Starmaze is supposed to be a very unusual game - unusually tedious in my view. It is a mish-mash of alien shooting games, asteroids and mazes. None of these parts are implemented particularly well and the quality of the graphics is very poor indeed. No imagination seems to have gone into the design of this game.

Instructions on screen and actual documentation are virtually non-existent. The object of the game is to roam around a spacebound maze made up of a set of coloured blocks, looking for the jewels and then laboriously trying to remember your way out again to take the treasure back to the mothership. Your space ship resembles the old triangular 'Asteroids' laser cannon. The so-called jewels are not as rare in the Starmaze as the blurb would have it and, somewhat ludicrously, are considerably bigger than your spaceship.

The maze occupies several screens and the scrolling between them is rather jerky, surprising when you consider the simplicity of the display.

Software Invasion have produced a lot of software for the Beeb over the years and much of it is very good. With Starmaze the standards have slipped considerably. I cannot recommend this game.