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Oids is a simple and hour-stealingly addictive new game for the Atari ST.

The basic idea is a very familiar one - a cross between Thrust and Choplifter. Simplicity itself. Your V-Wing ship is hatched gently from the mothership. Pushing forward on your joystick thrusts the ship forward with a puff of retro-rocket flame from its rear.

The V-Wing can spin through 360 degrees shooting out full stop sized gun fire. It is quite tiny on the screen - similar in size to the Asteroids ship.

Blasting is crucial particularly on the more difficult planets with their homing missiles and heavy ground-to-air bombardments.

The main gameplay is in controlling the ship and avoiding the flak. It is a real test of kill requiring the minutest adjustments to the ship's direction, speed and trajectory.

Each planet is a cavernous complex of jagged rocks, basins, and tiny flat plateaux where the Oids wait - shaking their arms furiously to attract your attention when you manage to get close to them. The Oids don't actually help themselves much. In their anxiousness to scramble aboard the V-Wing they run up and down like headless chickens sometimes in the way of your landing site. Landing is difficult enough without the desperate Oids due to the gravitational pull of the planet which makes the V-Wing drift as well as float downwards.

You can't really blame the Oids for being frantic - if they don't escape, their evil task-masters, the Biocretes, will melt them down, remake them and force them to slave for another lifetime. The Biocretes just don't give a monkeys you see. According to the storyline they say, "We built the Oids, so we have the right to treat them as we please".

Whether droids should have constitutional rights or not is something you might wish to ponder as you struggle to negotiate the complex caverns of the five progressively difficult planets. My guess is, however, that it will take all of your concentration to stay in the game.

It is the ground installations that make life really difficult. Some of the tower buildings issue an invisible forcefield that can send your V-Wing into a dangerous spin. Another conical tower materialises from nowhere and will, in seconds, send out an arc of flak curving up the edges of the screen as the Atari ST almost shuffers with the boom generated by this explosion.

Most deadly of all are the homing missile silos and one definite piece of strategy that you would do well to remember is to locate and destroy these at once. Their homing missiles are amongst the best I have seen in a computer game. They really pin you down and follow you, encircling you in ever decreasing circles until you make contact. Your only defence is to spin faster and eliminate them before they get too close. Believe me, when they start raining in in twos and threes, this ain't easy.

One of the best points about Oids is that it has a game designer and editor feature. When you have mastered the planets created for you by the game, you can design your own.

Any ST owner who has played Thrust will not want to be without Oids. My only criticism is the price. I know that Oids is not out of line with other Atari ST game price tags. It's just that having first played a £1.99 Firebird Thrust on a Commodore 16, and having loved it to death - more or less the same game seems a bit steep at twenty quid. Anyway, this game is too good to leave the review on a negative. I will say that, if you do fork out for it, you are in for hours of excellent computer entertainment.