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It's difficult to picture arcade games as propaganda, but there's a definite undertone of self-righteousness in U.N. Squadron. Whereas similar games, like P-47 and Side Arms used historic or sci-fi themes, U.N. Squadron is topical and a little worrying. The opening line of the scenario tells you the Middle East has been ruined by the civil war, manipulated by evil arms dealers and is now a threat to the world. Errr, this is make-believe?

The only thing that can stop it all is U.N. Squadron, a three-man team of pilots from Denmark, Japan and the USA. Gung ho, good ol' boys with the ability to put the world to rights... with guns and bombs. All seems a bit too close for comfort now, doesn't it? That's the trouble with buying "trendy" arcade-licences - you never know when they'll go out of favour.

OK, so it is only a game, and US Gold can't be blamed for picking one that turned into a prophecy. People have been buying East-v-West, Reds against Mom's apple pie games without a second thought until very recently, and at the time US Gold bought the licence, a non-anti-Russian shoot-'em-up must have seemed like a good idea.

In typical warmongering style, you are reminded at the start of the game that "everything that moves is hostile and potentially deadly, so destroy as much as possible". Even forgetting the undiplomatic approach, it's a bit crass, especially when you actually play the game itself.

The motto should have been: "everything that moves does so in whacking great jerky jumps, and is damn difficult to keep track of, let alone hit". Bullets are virtually impossible to spot against some of the gaudy backgrounds, while the sheer number of explosions, missiles and other paraphernalia confuse you to the extreme and totally overload your eyes.

The end result is a mess. Though the movement of your plane is fast and the firepower impressive, the animation has been compromised to allow this. There's little of the arcade's smoothness left and the constraints of the ST's 16 colour palette have resulted in sacrifices on the colour front. The colours chosen are almost entirely the wrong ones, and the game is a busy, colour-spattered nightmare.

The many introductory screens and the Japanese feel to the player-character graphics are the game's only redeeming factors. Here animation is smooth, but later, once you're actually airborne, it becomes jerky and flickery. Controlling your plane with any accuracy when it looks like this is hard, if not impossible.

Sounds are dull, tuneless attempts at re-creating the arcade melodies: five minutes is about all you can take before hitting the Sound Off key. Then you're left with the crash, hiss, fizz noises that you'd expect, but not necessarily desire.

Yawn! There must be more to life than this! The same old idea dressed up as... the same old idea. And not particularly impressive in any department. As a conversion it's fair, but as a game in its own right it's appalling.

So much effort has gone into re-creating the look of an arcade which simply won't work properly "as is" on the ST. Better contrasting colours, and slightly less action on screen - to give the ST a chance of looking like a 250 megabyte, custom-built arcade - would have prevented this chaotic, uncontrollable mess.

Buy it if the idea of total colour-blindness turns you on - but you could create the same effect with a poster paint set and a liquidiser with no lid.