Uh-oh. Apparently someone wrote in and complained last month that I was single-handedly killing the Speccy by giving some rubbishy old re-releases some crap marks, so I'm under instructions from Linda to be really positive this month. Which gives me a bit of a problem, because this game's completely useless. What on Earth am I going to do?

I suppose I could wibble on harmlessly about the plot for a few lines, I can't get in much trouble with that... Zoids is a game licenced from a collection of little plastic robot toys that were slightly popular for about five minutes in 1986 or thereabouts. You control a little Blue Zoid who's searching for the lost and scattered pieces of a really big and tough Blue Zoid in order to attack and destroy a horrendously evil big and tough Red Zoid. This you do by destroying little Red Zoid cities (with the aid of remote-control missile attacks) and searching through the rubble to see if there are any Big Blue Zoid bits lying around. Um... (drat, ran out of plot.)

(I guess I could always try to sound constructive by going through all the game's good points...) There's a slightly entertaining sub-game where you fire a missile at a bad guy and actually have to direct it to the target in a fast-moving 3D-view sequence which is quite good fun, and, er... (drat, ran out of good points.)

(Maybe I could mention the bad points really quickly in the smallest number of words possible and hope nobody was really paying attention...) It's incredibly repetitive; the way that your Zoid will refuse to follow your commands if it feels endangered is really annoying; the pixel-perfect accuracy you have to use on the totally invisible boundary of a destroyed city if you want to find the missing bits of the big Blue Zoid is stupendously ridiculous; the whole thing moves painfully slowly; the graphics are totally crap, just black screens with the odd blue oval shape and lots of pointless icons; nothing very much ever really happens; it's one of the most frustrating games you'll ever play; if you do suffer it for long enough to get to the end, it isn't worth it; it's completely... (drat, ran out of space.)

30%

BLIM!

'Zoids!' is one of the lesser-known exclamations used by Robin in the Batman TV shows of the 1960s, along with 'Holy One-Piece Swimsuits!' and 'Multitudinous Assimilations!'