It's a long time since anyone has had the bottle to put a game of this ilk out. Tank games of this sort are ten a penny on the budget market but they get very boring quickly.
But if you are like me and have an eternally open mind (cough cough) then you can appreciate that such products as this have a very basic idea to them.

At first sight Cytron looks like a pretty poor effort. In the ever-expanding world of computer graphics it is very rare nowadays that you get a game with less than average graphics from a company as big as Psygnosis. Rampart is the only other game that has been released recently that I can say would do well in spite of the pretty poor graphics.

Your mission is to pilot Cytron, a freshly developed multi-use tank with more weapons than a big, well-armed thing, around a research centre saving scientists. Cytron's main gimmick is its ability to divide itself into smaller and more manoeuvrable craft with even more silly weapons for you to start blitzing the inhabitants with.

You infiltrate a secret research base and rescue the humans trapped there by the mechanical workforce that has basically thrown a wobbler.

Unless you get in there soon the machines are really going to go bananas. To prevent these mechanoid menaces doing any more damage, once you have rescued as many people as possible an automatic destruct sequence is activated, so if you don't get out in time you go up with it.

The humans are pretty easy to find but they don't seem to show any intelligence at all which I found a bit disappointing. They will just walk until they reach a wall and then keep on going, getting nowhere fast.

The mad mechanoid workforce which you are up against is pretty formidable to say the least. Stormers, Bouncers, Assassins, plus supporting cast each with their own little quirks that make it a real challenge.

None of the opposition is anything new to arcade games of this sort but the sheer volume makes u for the lack of originality. Generally they aren't much of a problem but they certainly don't give themselves up for easy cannon fodder - they usually move like excrement off a red hot shove, and Cytron is not the most manoeuvrable of vehicles.

One rather irritating aspect is the enemy robots called Assassins which are pretty deadly and look very similar to the humans you pick up.

If you remember that you are up against a time limit and most of the time are travelling at breakneck speed, you don't have enough time to take in the physical characteristics of each sprite so quite often you find yourself getting stuffed by the Assassins.

As you travel around the several levels, the first thing that strikes you is the smoothness of the scrolling - it is quite awesome. Next are the sound effects - the various booms, blams and blaps are really satisfying as well as the atmospheric sounds that are thrown in for good measure.

One thing that is cropping up more and more in games nowadays is an interactive in-game computer. The first one I ever saw was on Alien Breed where you could change weapons and buy keys and so on.

It's pretty much the same on Cytron - you can upgrade your weapons depending on how much ammo you have and on the more tricky levels you can get plan view of the level to find out where you are and how to get round it.
The individual ships have their own weapons - choose either a bomb launcher or a laser - - and these can be individually upgraded if you need something with a little extra umff behind it.

Cytrn's a breath of fresh air after the recent spate of adventure-type games. A good shoot-em-up combined with a bit of a puzzle.

Well, it is exactly the same as Paradroid 90 really, isn't it? Metallic scrolling mazes, zip around them in a little robot thing, shoot lots of baddies and log on to a funny computer thing every now and again and faff around a bit.

Looks pretty conclusive from where I am sitting. Ah, but hang on a minute - there is a twist! (Nope, it is no use, I am not going to be able to keep up this feigned enthusiasm). In Cytron, as well as running around a scrolling metallic maze in a little robot thing shooting bad guys, you can, er, split up your little robot thing into TWO, even littler, robot things, with which you, um, run around the scrolling metallic mazes and, er, shoot bad guys. Oh, that is all right then.

BEEN THERE, DONE THAT
After so much innovation from Psygnosis, it is a little disturbing to see them not only releasing stuff this simple and retrogressive, but pricing it at the 'premium' £30 mark. Cytron is, essentially, a cut-down version of a game three years old.

It is quite good fun, there is nothing really wrong with it, but why bother? There is already something almost exactly the same but better out there, who in their right mind is going to fork out 30 quid on this? Still, on with the review, eh?

A TALE OF TWO ROBOTS
Cytron is actually a sort of cross between Paradroid 90 and Robosport, in as much as that you have to save lots of little scientists who can be found lying around in the various mazes that make up the game's levels. To get to some of them (or just to progress through the level), you will sometimes have to split your Cytron robot into two smaller ones called (ahem) Cyt and Ron. Up all night thinking of that one, yeah?

These have the advantage of being able to fit through tiny gaps and reach areas which are otherwise inaccessible, which is a nice idea, although in practice it mostly just means a lot of fairly pointless faffing around as you get to a narrow section, split your robot up, move one little bit through, move the other little bit through and join them up again.

The game positively bulges with other stuff (weapons upgrades, clever ways to control your robots with joystick, 'locking joystick', mouse, two joysticks, two mice, and probably your TV's remote as well, power-ups that make you invisible or cause all the scientists on a level to home in on you, doors and barriers that have to be switched on and off, and all manner of clever stuff that you can do with the computer terminals littered around each level), but it is only window dressing - 95% of the time you will be zipping around shooting everything you can see, and that is about it.

HEAVY INERTIA, MAN
Unfortunately, for the duration of that 95% of the time, you will be zipping around shooting entirely the wrong things and zipping in entirely the wrong direction, thanks (but no thanks) to the, um, over-enthusisastic control response of your little robot things. It is extremely inertia-heavy (well, actually, come to think of it, it is not. Inertia means it is hard to make it stop, but in Cytron the control is more just plain frictionless - one touch on the stick sends your robot lurching off at great speed, and it takes a fair bit of persuading to make it skid to a halt again), and in the default single-joystick mode that, let us face it, most people will be using, you have to move your robot in a direction before you can fire that way.

Nothing wrong with that in itself, but with the tight design of many of the game's levels and the aforementioned lurching movement, you will spend more time simply ramming your enemies than you do shooting them. Still, some people like that kind of thing - look at Kick Off 2 (Oh no, not again - Ed).

DON'T IT MAKE YOU FEEL GOOD?
Still, let us be fair and conscientiously list all the game's good points and mitigating factors, despite the fact that it won't make the slightest difference to the final mark, on the grounds that a game should be judged on whether it entertains you and makes you feel good, regardless of any technical considerations. No, on second thoughts, let us not bother, eh?