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Everybody likes the odd firework now and again. But when the exploding rocket in question is actually an inter-planetary space vessel which has crash-landed and is about to engulf the Earth in a ball of white-hot hydrogen, then it's time to put away the sparklers and the baked potatoes, get out your combat suit with built-in flamethrower, and get the hell on over there to fix things before it goes bang!

It seems this particular ship was bringing the Pioneer 10 space probe back to Earth before it was hijacked by pirates who sabotaged the ship's computer. So the first thing to do is to revive it by conducting an energy crystal from the storage bay to the heart of the machine. Unfortunately, the ship's decks are laden with alien beasties who have to be torched to oblivion before they'll let you through the complex of platforms and pillars to the ship's fuel socket.

With that task complete you have to get to the ship's self-destruct computer and stop it from going boom. But the pirates have blocked the way so you have to swim through the fuel tanks which are full of floating mines and fish-like pirates! Use the floating mines to destroy the fish-like pirates, and things should be okay, though.

The final level puts you on top of a mechanical walker, armed with a plasma gun which is just the thing for blowing up more nasty pirates, tanks and, of course, the self-destruct computer at the end of the game.

Hey, not bad! A quality Spectrum game in one 48K load! The most impressive thing about Extreme is the graphics - not just well-defined but really colourful too, with no attribute clash and even a few extra shades usually unavailable to the Spectrum!

The sprites throughout are big and smoothly animated (check out the Walker on level three!) and the scrolling is super-smooth parallax stuff.

The gameplay isn't bad either, and things are livened up by the variety of tasks and the highly impressive weaponry!

Perhaps the fact that there are only three levels are a bit of a downer, but there's plenty to them, and they're pretty tough, so you're not going to finish them in a hurry!

All in all, then, "Extreme"ly good!