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Despite ten years at the top of the gamer's popularity, the bog-standard, save the world, blast all in sight, but don't lose any of your three lives' style shoot-'em-up, is still a formula re-designed and, occasionally, improved upon by software houses who know from which direction the dosh is flowing.

Far be it from me to criticise this, it seems natural that the average teenager loves nothing more than to kill things from other planets.

Are you the type to eat a banana without peeling it? Are you the type to face an army of deranged Bristol Rovers fans under the influence of potent West Country Scrumpy, wearing your Bristol City scarf proudly? [Yep, that's me! - Ed] [Liar! - Ad Man] Are you the type with the guts to tell your headmaster where he can stick his detention? If you answered yes, then you are a fool! Exactly the type needed for the mission presented to you in Vengeance.

Dare you fly single-handedly into your nippy little spacecraft, and face the oncoming alien onslaught. Sounds familiar, eh? Still, this tacky waffle has been the scenario for many a good shoot-'em-up, so I suppose I'd better not moan until I find out that facts...

The game is a vertically scrolling shoot-'em-up, your fighter is placed at the bottom of the screen and can be moved in any direction. Its twin-gun lasers are hanging eagerly off the side of each wing just waiting to blast a hole in some green slimeball's kidney. Blam!! you get your first chance when a group of blue suckets came careering head on towards you.

I was forced to let three of those mothers live, as they had already gone past my line of fire, oh well just as I was ready to take on another fleet with my bullet-proof ego, two metallic rust-buckets appeared at either side of me and pumped me full of photon death.

Once I got the feel of the game, I began to discover that there was a little more to it than just blasting everything that moves. It's also possible to blast things that don't move, such as the little squares on the space station type backdrop. This is neat. But even neater is that I discovered that, when you shoot a certain type of square, you are given a random bonus.

Unlike other games where the bonus is given once the icon is shot, in this one you really have to earn it. You have to catch the bonus as it floats down any point in the screen often forcing you to swirl in some seemingly impossible spirals in order to avoid local alien beings. The bonuses are of a not-particularly-amazing new style, but there are a couple of useful ones such as extra lives, invincibility, or more powerful laser to be picked up.

"So that's it! Sounds like a pretty average blast, eh" said one hardened, shoot-'em addict to another. "No, that's not it," replied a very handsome, modest and particularly perceptive little games reviewer by the name of Hamilton. "Inside the crispy shoot 'em coating, is a smooth, velvety, tasteful little arcade adventure. This more intellectual part of the game is the key to completing Vengeance. The object is to board all eight of the different types of alien crafts to be found, and then, once you're on them, find and destroy their vital circuits. The way to do this is to shoot enough of the space station in the backdrop (this builds up your power) until you get about five hundred power points. Power points are needed to board the ships. You will use anything from ten to a thousand power points simply getting to the ship depending on how far away it is. Once you have boarded the ship, the rest of your power points are transferred to time allowed on the ship. You will have to build up enough power to last at least a minute on each ship, allowing you enough time to find these vital circuits. To find these circuits, you must use a small map of the three-dimensional ships, which appears in the top right-hand corner. These will show up as little targets on the map, and on the main screen you must line up your fire and blow these away, but remember, time is the key!!

As it stands I would buy this, which to me is all that matters. The graphics are nice but not amazing, the sound is very boring syntho number but nothing that a quick twist of the volume control doesn't solve. The saving grace is in the heart of the game itself, quite a rarity nowadays. Definitely worth a shot.