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Domark's re-release label hasn't made much of an impact on the budget market to date, a fact probably attributable in equal measures to the suspect quality of most of the games and the fact that pretty much all of them have already been released by the Doms on compilations (sometimes on more than one compilation, come to that). That might just possibly change with the release of this fab little arcade game, converted from a Tengen coin-op which never achieved the success it deserved.

It's a very simple little shoot-'em-up runaround in play, with your objective being to blast through huge numbers of enemy robots on each of, ooh, dozens of levels, rescuing kidnapped scientists and perpetrating gratuitous vandalism on the alien bases where they're held as you go along (it's almost like a 3D version of Robotron in some ways).

What makes it great is the sheer no-nonsense fast-action fun of it all, as well as the neat cartoony presentation and the attractive, brightly-coloured graphics which pack a lot of detail into their small dimensions. There are loads of really nice animation touches too, which add greatly to the atmosphere without ever getting in the way or slowing things down, and generally, Escape From The Planet Of The Robot Monsters just gets on with the business of giving you a game instead of trying to be big or hard or clever and impressing you with parallax this or copperlist that or light-sourced the other. This is simply classic computer game entertainment, and I love it.

There's probably a question mark over lasting appeal, but who cares when a game's this much good honest fun? I certainly don't, and for eight quid neither should you.