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Can there be a life as gung ho as an Astro Marine’s? Big guns, rippling muscles and loads of beer and death. But life is not all fun and laughter. Just like a fireman has to deal with fire-infested buildings, and Roy Schneider in "Jaws" had to deal with shark infested waters, the Astro Marine Corps tackle minor problems such as hordes of invading aliens.
With a task such as that, you would be surprised if there were queues of applicants willng to sign up. Well, no surprises here. The entire army of AMC consists of you and a gun. Still, you were daft enough to enlist, therefore you are daft enough to go traipsing across the countryside killing everything that moves into view, eventually clambering aboard the alien mothership.

And the whole caboodle, like so many of its type, is a right-to-left scroller that takes you through dozens of levels, taking on progressively nastier aliens until you reach a big momma nasty. It first the style of game that AMC has large colourful graphics and a nice soundtrack. But, sadly, unlike others it is not much fun to play.

The graphics are very nice indeed. The sprites are large and well animated, and the twin level parallax scrolling is as smooth as can be. The playabilty problems start to arise in the size of the playing area in relation to the main sprite. As most of the enemies cannot get off the ground, and the ones that do only really fly at head height, your chances of missing an enemy, even through random firing, are minimal. If find that just a little too easy.

That is not the whole problem. The control systems means that all too frequently you can be firing your gun, move to jump over a hole and end up firing upwards and running straight into it. And the levels are highly repetitive, as are the aliens. AMC looks great, but do not let that fool you into buying what is essentially a very dull, very average SEU.

Tony Dillon