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Those aliens, eh? They'll try anything. After countless sound drubbings at the hands of video game players everywhere, the evil extraterrestrial swine have abandoned the usual straightforward approach and started to get just a little bit sneaky.

Using a time machine (oh no!) stolen from an Earth space station, they've "infiltrated the past in the hope of destroying human history". In the usual bizarre plot hitch, for some reason Earth can't send half a million heavily-armed tanks after them and have to rely on one man with a rifle. Ho bloody hum. Guess who the mug is, yet again? Yep, it's you.

Your objective is to "mend the ruptured fabric of time", which, in this case, entails wandering around a maze of platforms shooting aliens, rescuing hostages, collecting keys, battling against big end-of-level meanies, and drinking lots of coffee in a vain attempt to stay awake. Zone Warriors features a 3D maze on a 2D screen, which means lots of confusing "into-the-screen" doorways and heavy reliance on a compass.

Getting your bearings isn't helped any by the fact that all the screens look exactly the same, which isn't surprising when you realise that they're all made up of a very small number of blocks, which are thrown haphazardly together to provide some kind of rudimentary attempt at distinctive levels.

Occasionally, while you're traipsing around, you find a captive you can rescue, or a power-up of some frighteningly imaginative description such as three-way or five-way fire, or even a speedup if you're really lucky - and that, as they say is about it.

If, by some miracle, you manage to maintain interest beyond the first 20 minutes, you may well stumble across one of the big boss baddies - once you've collected the key to the room he's hiding in.

If you kill him, you get to travel on through time to the next level, where you get to do it all, all over again. Then again, you may not. You're unlikely to care either way.

Zone Warriors' only chance of concealing the astoundingly tedious, repetitive, pointless and unrewarding gameplay found here would be to eclipse it with staggering technical effects, but the graphics and sound are so unremittingly mediocre that there's no chance of that whatsoever.

The programmers have made a half-hearted attempt at ripping off Turrican, but even that rather characterless blaster had more life to it than this. Playing the game with one hand while reading a newspaper and eating our lunch we still couldn't get killed for over 30 mintues in the first game, and only managed it then because the phone rang. In the intervening time, we'd run around some featureless junglescape, shot some aliens, run around some featureless junglescape, shot some aliens, run around some featureless - well, you get the idea... Nothing quite this lame has been released for a very long time.

1. Dull, terminally unimaginative graphics in a very small playing area.
2. Gameplay gets hopelessly tedious within two minutes (that's not an exaggeration either!)
3. Only the most bloody-minded will ever bother to reach level two... and it isn't worth the effort.