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Trigger Happy is one of those zapping games that gives you minimal instructions, leaving you to work out what's going on mostly for yourself, and just to con you into thinking it's worth your while, they've stuck "featuring an amazing secret" onto the cassette inlay!

Well, it takes a real vacant-brain to be fooled by this kind of stuff. As expected, there not much in the way of depth to Trigger Happy - not until you find out the secret which, er, I haven't yet uncovered.

Anyway, the game goes something like this. You are in control of a craft that looks curiously like a dentist's chair. You fly from left to right, blasting as you go, until you reach the end of the level. Now here's the cunning bit. When you complete one level, you start another one, only this time it's slightly more difficult. Thirty-two levels further along and you've finished the game.

The only real problem to tax the brain is the level of your shield. Bumping into things and being hit by enemy fire causes your shield to go down. That's indicated by a bar at the bottom right of the screen. With no shields left, you're doomed.

The shield is self-replenishing in time, but you can get more by crashing into the occasional monolith marked with the word 'bonus'. Trouble is, these switch to 'greed' fairly quickly, seeing you off immediately if you hit them at the wrong time. Finishing a level automatically boosts your shield to full strength ready for the next onslaught.

Unlike most shoot-'em-ups, Trigger Happy is really quite slow both in its scrolling and movement of the craft. It gets even slower when you're firing. Despite that, there's still plenty of room for skill because there are no many obstacles.

Most of the obstacles can be disposed of easily, revealing a kind of grid pattern underneath. Others take more shots and will fire back at you. Some move up and down and can be crashed into when they're up. The enemy installations are harmless when recessed in the ground but will fire at you even once you've passed them, from behind once they've popped up onto the surface again.

There's also a well-defined route to take through each level, giving each one a maze-like quality. On later levels you'll meet tanks and rocket launchers.

On the whole, there's nothing really new about the scenery - it looks like loads of other games I've seen before, only a bit bigger and chunkier. You expect various objects to do something when you blast them, like increase your speed or give you more spectacular firepower. They don't, they just get blasted, and your firepower remains the usual spray of dots - very disappointing.

A nice touch is that there is a different sound effect for each gun. So with three guns working, you hear a three-tone effect; with two, you hear only two.

In its favour, Trigger Happy's graphics are bigger and bolder than the usual. And the craft is much larger and fairly well defined. I suppose that's why everything moves so slowly. Despite that, there's plenty of challenging action. But with 32 similar levels to contend with, the secret had better be worth the trouble.

Also in its favour are the passwords. At the beginning of the game, you're invited to enter a password, which will take you directly to the level for that password. This is sensible programming. Programmers who make you go all the way back to the beginning, in my opinion, deserve to be locked up in a room with Paul Daniels.