What strikes terror into the hearts of grown men more than anything? Small eight-legged creatures with mandibles, that's what! Bit silly really, considering they're harmless and their only interests in life are weaving webs and eating flies.

Mind you, magnify their size to ten times the size of a house and give them an appetite for human flesh and it's a different story. Especially when a spaceship full of passengers happens to crash-land bang into the middle of the biggest arachnid-infested web that you've ever seen.

And that's exactly what has happened. A starliner is stuck in the sticky strands, and the passengers have scarpered. Their lives are in your hands. You have just about enough power to move along the web itself. It's their only hope of escape.

You mission is to free the fleeing passengers. Some are roaming around the web, while others have had the misfortune to be cocooned by the oversized people-eating beasties. Your craft can only carry four at a time so you need to act fast.

Somewhere on the web there's a teleport. Take the freed folk to that and they're safe. Also hidden on the web are power pods. Take your ship over one and your flagging energy is restored, as is your limited supply of ammo.

Movement is strictly along the lines of the web. You can go left, right and diagonally in four directions. Your little ship has inertia, so if you're pelting along at full speed and see a spider, chances are you're about to end up dead. Each creepy creatures takes several hits and, besides, contact with a spider - even in its dying throes - results in doom.

So a cautious approach is called for. You have to sneak around the web, but don't take it too easy - there's a rapidly decreasing time limit and the captives go through the stages of being cocooned, then eaten alive at an alarming rate.

Locating the imprisoned peeps is made fairly easy byt the radar at the foot of the screen. It only shows free-moving people, though, so you need to keep a careful eye on it. When a dot disappears then someone's been cocooned. You have to move really fast then because the next time a spider comes across the trapped people it's feeding time!

GRAPHICS AND SOUND

A tune that would not be out of place accompanying a Snoopy cartoon plays throughout. It's enough to have you reaching for the volume control before you become a gibbering wreck. The graphics aren't bad exactly, but they're not stunning either. The spiders are nicely drawn and well animated but the blokes are tiny, they're little more than stick men. The web is very angular and doesn't really look like a web at all. Nice, but there's precious little variation either colour-wise or graphically.

LASTING INTEREST

There are reputed to be 125 levels to play. If the first few are anything to go by, there isn't an awful lot of difference between them. No number of levels can disguise what is essentially a dull game. After the first few goes, it'll remain on the shelf and rarely see the insides of your disk drive.

JUDGEMENT

The constraints of web travel take away the freedom of movement that is normally enjoyed in shoot-em-ups. In fact it's downright annoying! You have to hit the diagonals precisely to move off the horizontal sections of web. It's all too easy to miss a vital turn-off that would save you from being devoured.

Web of Terror is a quirky game, frustrating to play and there's just not enough there to keep you going.