Whether you're a keen UFO watcher or a Nick Veitch sceptic who thinks that all extra terrestrials are really weather balloons used by the FBI to spy on hapless nations, one thing's for sure - UFOs always capture the general public's imagination.

UFO: Enemy Unknown from Microprose is a game guaranteed to set your phasers to stun no matter what side of the aliens from outer space theory you believe in.

Mix and match
UFO manages to combine shape and meld several game genres to produce a thoroughly entertaining, thought provoking reactive, pro-active and strategic gaming experience. Programmed by Nick and Jullian Gallop of 8-bit Chaos and Laser Squad fame, UFO: Enemy Unknown embraces elements of the latter. That is, the main action is turn-based - you move first, followed by the alien. There now follows a short description of the game from boot-up to assembling on interception squad for the aliens who've landed on Earth.

The first screen you see is the Geoscape. It's a large, round textured 3Dish representation of planet Earth. It can be rotated a full 360 degrees in any plane of latitude and longitude. In other words, you can centre on any part of the globe so that it appears in the middle of the screen. From there the section that's been centred on can be zoomed into or out of.

Base control
Your first task lies in the placement of a base which is your UFO early warning detection station. It hosts all the amenities required for efficient early warning and interception of UFOs: Living quarters for personnel, hangars for interception aircraft, research laboratories, detection radar and a while host of other essential facilities.

Ideally, the base should be placed in a land-locked area. This way, when a UFO is detected and shot down, the wreckage is more likely to be recovered by your clean up crews of shock troops. This is where the game's Laser Squad element comes in. But rather than use the old top-down style of the original Laser Squad, the Gallops have opted for a more satisfyingly solid 3D isometric view. And very effective it is too. The graphics are lush, aesthetically pleasing, beautifully and, er, they look good as well.

Sabre Team players will recognise the tactics and strategies needed to neutralise the alien invaders. Line of sight, limited movement, return fire, use of cover, minimisation of risk, effective use of weapons, personal armour - they are all there to be exploited, refined and perfected. The task of defending the Earth isn't an easy one.

Fatal progression
Moreover, your soldiers improve with every successful mission they take part in. You start off with some rookies. Each one with his own name. As they improve, they become more resilient and more accurate with their weapons. And they progress through the ranks with each successful mission. You can't help but become attached to them. Which at times can be a bit of a bind. I had to leave the office for a few minutes after I lost Sergeant Henri Coicaud. He was ambushed by a couple of the aliens while ona lone wolf mission. He will be sorely missed by all.

Although the missions are generated randomly, they increase in difficulty very quickly and the aliens use progressively more dangerous and effective technology. To counteract this, you can recruit scientists and carry out research.

As soon as the research is finished - it may be on developing a new laser pistol, for example - you can manufacture that item with some of your engineers. Your scientists can also engage in evolutionary analysis - from laser pistol to laser rifle, for example.

Experimentation and manufacture is the crux of the game. In order to win, you have to build a spaceship that will travel to Mars and let you take the aliens on in their own environment. To do this, alien technologies must be exploited and made best use of.

And the game starts to get pretty exciting as soon as some of the heavier weapons and artifacts become available to you. There's nothing more satisfying than dowing an alien with only one shot from a laser pistol or a rifle when it would have taken two or three shots to finish him off with standard equipment.

Jack of all trades
Basically, you've got to be all things to all people - strategist, technician, financial manager, warrior, leader and ultimately, saviour of the world.

The mechanics of the game that let you realise this rather lofty ambition are everything we've come to expect form Microprose - slick, unobtrusive, well thought out, logically laid out very challenging.

The Geoscape is lvoely, it handles easily and lets you get on with the game. The bases are extremely easy to build and modify, with many features included that you wouldn't have thought necessary until you start using them. And most of all, the tactical section is genuinely tension-building. Especially when you grow attached to your little blokes and can name them all personally.

Because of the sheer quantity and quality of the choice of games on the Amiga market, you never really go back to them for another play unless it's for a feature or something - or unless a game is exceptionally good. UFO: Enemy Unknown is one I'll go back to again and again. Highly recommended.

There are no more heroes. In the world of endemic cynicism in which we live, anyone who develops the slightest aura of nobility or greatness is grabbed, ground down between society's gnashing molars and spat out, left as a salivary smear. (Anything you want to tell us about, C-Monster? - Ed) in the gutter for passing Samaritans to throw change to. Metaphorically speaking, natch.

Consider the case of Julian Gollop who exploded into public view in the days of the Spectrum, categorically stating that "arcade games are complete crap". He wrote a series of games that ran with the pace of the best shot-'em-ups while confronting you with the huge mental task of overcoming intelligent computers or even seven other real people.

They had enough addictive punch to tear our your windpipe, but now ten years down the line my hero has created something that's depressed me more than my last Ex.

An illustrative analogy, perhaps?
Take an original Calvin and Hobbes strip, clean of form and pure of purpose. Now photocopy it, then copy the copy, and five replications further on, you've created a meaningless, ugly black scrawl. Ladies and Gentlemen: I give you UFO (A500).

But essentially this is the same charming A1200 game which Cam so elegantly reviewed in AP43, bravely claiming that it was Laser Squad meets Premier Manager and worth 85%. What's changed?

It certainly isn't the graphics, which area fair approximation of the original's, even though the palette's occasionally garish, and all the soldiers skate rather than walk due to the complete lack of walking animations. The music (obviously) is a TOOL OF THE DEVIL HIMSELF, but since you can turn it off, we can't blame it for UFO's diabolic nature.

The gameplay is identical to that of its parent, mixing thought-provoking economics and turn-based man-on-wargame action. There's still the ridiculously large handguns for annihilating fearsome aliens who've come to steal our women, and present and correct is the intuitive action point system. So what's up?

CIGAR
Speed my friends. It seems that no-one's playtested this to see how it actually plays on the A500. I mean if they had, they'd have noticed that any half-decent battle leads to the appetizing prospect of a fifteen minute wait between turns, and I could have been spared the hot, furious tears that spilled across my cheek while I waited FORY FIVE (count 'em!) MINUTES before being allowed to (y'know) play again. I repeat for the Championship Manager fans at the back. Forty. Five. Minutes. They might as well have printed WAIT WHILE I WASTE THE MOST PRECIOUS YEARS OF YOUR LIFE.

Playing from disks, even when you're having your turn, the game loads when you attempt to scroll the screen. It loads when you press half your controls. Mouse clicks occasionally register seconds after you've pressed it, leading to the delightful phenomena of troops wandering aimlessly into our fiendish foes' firing line, or your obscenely vicious tank obliterating friendly operatives as they crawl stealthily through the undergrowth.

ZEPPELIN
And in terms of ruining atmosphere we see startling innovations. In a moment of sheer genius the game skips back to Workbench for several seconds at the climax of each level. Truly this must be the Programming SNAFU of Champions. This lack of momentum reveals Laser Squad's tedious wargame mechanics that were previously hidden under an effervescent rush of pace.

Completely naked, UFO appears to have an unappealing pot belly. With an accelerator, this would be as cool as multi-flavoured Toffos, and even with a hard drive, you're delightfully spared the disk-accessing agony, but what's the point of an A500 game which doesn't work on a bog-standard A500? No point, comrades. No point at all.

They may have come from beyond the galaxy to terrorise the unwary (and in most cases, incredibly stupid) population, they may have technology far surpassing ours, they may be all warty and brown and smell a bit, but they're not fooling anyone. The game's called UFO, but it's nothing more than another reworking of that cranky old game Laser Squad. People of the world - rejoice!

Julian and Nick, the brothers Gollop, wrote Laser Squad abck in the days when they called themselves Target and then sold it under name of Blade. Now (in their ongoing bid to foil the sinister attentions of the Treasury, Josef Mengele's illegitimate son AND certain splinter groups of Hezollah, Party of God) they've written UFO under the nom de plume of Mythos Games Ltd. But even though they've been rattling through the names at a fast enough pace they're still writing the same game - though with a bit of a story this time.

SHOCKER
It's the near future (as it is so often) and to try to mee the threat of rampaging alien invaders, the Extraterrestrial Combat Unit (XCOM) (Surely ECU? Ed) has been given permission to violate any country's airspace and shoot down any UFOs they can find. The idea's ultimately to rid Earth of these villains' horrid alien nastiness by developing a ring of defensive bases around the world, but that'll take you a long, long time.

You start the game at the birth of the XCOM organisation, with a single base, a few personnel, minimal stores and a couple of planes. The manual runs a really friendly tutorial section, but the game;s easy enough to get into anyway as long as you're aware of your aims.

The base section of the game presents you with enough stat screens to make even the most complex footy management sim green with envy, and it's this section, that separates UFO from the previous 'stand up and fight' versions of Laser Squad. (Or rebelstar Raiders to trace the game's history right back and impress everyone with our mighty powers).

After each successful combat mission, you return with alien artifacts and weapons which you can then disassemble, examine and ultimately manufacture. In this way your firepower grows, while at the same time you get paid more and more by countries grateful to your protection. So you build more bases, recruit more staff, down more UFOs and eventually make the world a safer place to live in. That's the plan at least.

SECRETED RESIN
Pointing and clicking your way through various menus, you can add new sections to the base, order and pay for new equipment (from hand grenades to interceptor jet fightes) and look up stats on all your curiously named staff. There's something about near-future games that assumes everyone will be called Ludquist Svenson or Amall Traventi rather than Paul Greenwood or Billy Brown. Explanations on postcards would be most welcome. (It's a tradition with Gollop games. They started off naming their characters quite sensibly, experimented predictably with people from SF books and then settled on really stupid names. Actually. - Ed)

When you finally spot a UFO, you scramble an interceptor, but unfortunately, the air tracking/air combat part of the game's no fun at all. A small radar screen pops up and gives you the option of engaging the UFO at extreme range, or whooshing in and giving it everything you've got. Either way, it's a bit of a lottery as to who wins.

GOTCHA
If you get them before they get you, you're all ready for phase three of the game - the Laser Squad bit. You pack up to eight soldiers in a transport plane, zoom them straight over to the crash site in a powerful transporter plane, and then send them out with as much equipment as either they can carry or you can afford.

It's bug hunt time. For those of you unfamiliar with Laser Squad (and therefore clinging to the thread of this review by the tips of your fingers) the system works like this. The game takes place in turns. A turn is split into movement points, and these are soaked up by your actions. If you walk, that's a few points gone. If you kneel down or turn around, that's a few more. Firing from the hip takes less points than an aimed shot (but is less accurate), and if you use up all the action points in that soldier's turn they're completely at the mercy of the aliens.

However, if you save enough t shoot back, you can tell your soldier to fire at any aliens moving across his (or her, this is a near-future scenario after all) line of sight. This line of sight rule determines how much of the playing area you can see. Most of the level stays black until your squad's had a look around, and even then buildings and trees cast shadows behind them. Also, if a soldier's got his back to an alien, they won't appear on the screen until the soldier turns around.

DESTROY THEM
The section falls down on two counts. There's something not quite right with the line of sight rules, especially when a soldier's on a higher level than the target. Quite often you'll be on a rooftop with a clear view of the area below, but (obviously wrongly) be told you can't see an alien standing out in the open. Also (and I'll admit this is a personal 'games versus reality' type argument) when a soldier moves past a window, an alien can shoot and kill him as he flashes by - even though the alien would have had no chance to acquire the target. ("Recognise there's someone there and identify them as an enemy soldier." - Ed)

The second (and more important) gripe is time. When it comes to the aliens' turn, you have to sit there and wait for ages while the computer moves them around. I clocked up over six minutes between moves on a particularly hectic level.

The A1200 version of Sabre Team (also a Laser Squad clone, fact fans) (Though not by the Gollops, further fact fans. - Ed) managed to pack all of this baddie-moving down to a few seconds, so what went wrong here? Equally annoying is the high frequency of disk swapping you have to endure. It hampers your enjoyment hugely, and raises suspicion that the game's intended for hard disk owners only, because the floppy version really does provide only a second-rate version of the game.

BUT
UFO's still great though. (As long as you play it from a hard drive that is). The missions pop up randomly so you don't get bored when you play it again, new weapons increase your firepower to match the aliens', it's incredibly tense and exciting, and if you mess up badly you get trounced. Just like real life. (But probably without the alien invasion motif).

Before I get started here, I'd like to ask you a quick question. If a UFO landed in your back garden tonight, would you; a) Walk very slowly towards it looking all sleepy and wearing only your stripey pajamas. b) Dress in your finest clothes and stride proudly towards those travellers from another world, only too aware that you represent the entire human race. c) Pap your pants, grab the biggest, nastiest gun you could find, and run screaming at the ugly silver gits, trying to rearrange their stomachs using high explosives.

Yes, me too. Strange isn't it, because that's exactly what MicoProse thought. Rather than write a game based around meeting nice little aliens with messages of love and a cure for hiccups (i.e. drinking a pint of chip fat while holding your ankles) they've taken the angle that says, "you haven't got the same number of arms as me, so I'm going to kill you". And to be brutally frank, I'm glad!

To get to the point, UFO is most definitely not a game about putting on nice white jumps suits and offering home-made fruit cakes to small green fish-people. It's about kicking serious alien butt, using some of the most satisfying weaponry you'll find this side of Jabba The Hutt's badroom.

U F WHO?
UFO: Enemy Unknown, places you as the leader of a united Earth force known as Xcom. Basically, following a number of UFO sightings - not to mention human abductions and cattle mutilation - the combined nations' leaders have decided that enough is enough, and it's time to get together and show nasty aliens exactly who's several hundred years behind in everything!

It's now down to you to make best use of the funding put your way to build a global network of bases, not to mention hiring the best scientists to research recovered alien artifacts, and to manufacture more potent weapons.

You start with a few decent intercopter aircraft, plus a healthy supply of ground troops just gagging for a chance to kick some serious ET bottom (or whatever this particular race are equipped with in the 'pants' department, along with money to invest in new facilities, more equipment, or better staff.

You can accelerate time, and as the days pass, sighting reports will start to flood in. It's at the point you can test your military might, sending in your interceptors to shoot down the aforementioned cigar-shaped blighters.

Should you successfully knock any alien craft from the sky without either destroying it completely or dumping it into the sea, it's time to send in those troops to do their stuff. This is where the game changes radically from a strategy game to a turn-based action affair in the Sabre Team/Laser Squad mould (which is not surprising since UFO is written by the original LS authors!)

Isometric strategy is the name of the game here, with your individual soldiers having to make the bst use of their given time units. To walk costs so much, as does shooting, climbing, opening doors etc. Kill and surviving aliens and you'll walk away with toys galore, not to mention improved funding from the country involved.

YOU F O!
UFO deserves a big pat on the back, as it manages to combine some excellent strategy ideas with some top action (complete with big guns and bigger explosions) to create a satisfying overall package. The strategy bits on their own are rewarding enough, with your scientists making more and more discoveries as time passes by, but coupled with the action sections, UFO really has something to offer.

It's hard to do the game any justice in a single page review because there are just so many things to look at, but UFO really is an enormous can of worms just waiting to be emptied onto your bed (I think I'm going to be sick - Ed).

The only major criticism that holds UFO back from the 90% plus scores, is the fact that the enemy turns during the isometric battles, can sometimes take up to ten minutes (a problem the original Sabre Team suffered from).

Still, I admit to have loved Sabre Team and the original Laser Squad, so call me biased and call me easily pleased, but whatever you do, don't miss out on the many, many hours of gaming that UFO has on offer.