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To describe a game as 'the latest blockbuster from Tony Crowther' is hardly a recommendation, as owners of Challenge Of The Gobots and William Wobbler will testify. Our Tony has been responsible for more than his fair share of turkeys over the years, but he's also got the ability to occasionally deliver the goods and take everybody by surprise.

Zig Zag is, without qualification, the goods. Tony has teams up with David Bishop to produce one of the most sophisticated hunt 'n kill maze games that you're ever likely to see on the C64, with smooth action, flawless animation, solid 3D scenery and a nice line in clanky metallic sound effects.

The game has no plot at all - not unless you'd describe flying down corridos blasting away at everything which moves as a plot. The action takes place entirely within a huge city of hi-rise blocks and intersecting streets, picked out in perspective 3D and pastel shades which change to signify the different city zones. The streets widen and narrow, go up and down ramps, and as you fly down them the intervening buildings disappear, allowing you to see where you're going.

Down these mean streets come hurtling crowds of aircraft, rockets, torpedoes and bug-eyed hoppers and generally they don't look too friendly. So kill them.

Hidden somewhere amongst the 32 zones and 1,380 screens of the city are the Eight Crystals of Zog, and it won't surprise you to learn that you've got the find all eight before you can once again sleep easy at nights. If you're one of the first five to finish the game, Mirrorsoft will give you a ghetto-blaster autographed by ypoung Tone himself. Despite that, the game is still worth playing.

What makes Zig Zag different from all the other shoot-the-aliens-pick-up-the-crystals games, besides the polish of its presentation, is the ingenious way in which you travel round the maze.

Your dinky little delta-wing can only fly up and down, and sidestep to left and right. It can't turn corners. Which is a bit of a problem in a city composed entirely of streets at right angles. But there are prisms at ground level at some junctions, and if you hit these at the correct angle of incidence they'll send you zooming off at 90 degrees until you hit the next prism, if there is one.

If you're flying too high or off-target, you miss the prisms altogether, and you keep travelling in a straight line until either you bounce off a wall, or you get blown to bits by the enemy.

The whole thing sounds a bit like a physics lessons, and takes some getting used to. For the first thirty minutes or so you'll loathe it. Hopefully, though, things will suddenly click, and instead of rocketing all over the place like the Dow Jones Index, you can get on with the serious business of exploring and killing.

Actually, killing is in this instance not totally gratuitous. The more beasts and craft you destroy, the better your credit rating is at the bank, so that after a spree of stopped there. As well as the usual toggle options for music and sound effects, there is also a reverse joystick mode, enabling your stick to operate like an aircraft joystick (push forward to descend), and a Brain Teaser mode. In this all the hunting and zapping goes on as before but in addition you've also got to solve horrible logic problems, involving the use of flashing targets which open and close streets, and remove and replace prisms. And then there are the time locks...

One of the most inventive variants on a well-worn theme, Zig Zag is like a breath of fresh air.