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Fernandez Must Die is, apart from being a very bad title for a game, a mix of Ikari Warriors and Into The Eagle's Nest. It's also brilliant. It boots Ikari in the goolies and turns the Eagle into a budgie, so to speak, leaving you with a two-player trek through lots of scrolling screens of action-packed battleground, with a bit of building exploration thrown in.

The Fernandez in question is in fact an evil dictator who has set up eight bases, the purpose of each to defend one of the eight strips of land he has taken over. He has captured all of the allied soldiers and the gold and hidden them inside the buildings that join the eight strips. Your mission is to seek and destroy these bases, whilst recovering the 202 caches of gold and the 182 POW's. Sounds like quite a job. Luckily you don't have to do it alone.

The game is arranged as a huge map, broken up into eight vertical strips, each several screens long and joined by rooms with closed doors that you have to blast your way into. You and a friend race headlong up and down the vertically scrolling areas, searching for the huge L-shaped buildings, the bases, and avoiding everything the enemy can throw at you, and believe me, that's quite a lot.

Firstly, you've got your definitive enemy soldiers. These run on from the top or the bottom of the screen and to chase you in and around the buildings, firing all the while.

The enemy place either drops more soldiers, medical supplies with which you can boost your flagging energy or bombs, which churn up the ground, killing anything they touch, including you. Then you've got the tanks. Three times your sprite, these hunter-killers mill about, firing huge shells in your direction.

Doing the same job as the tank in Ikari, the jeep lets you get around at around three times the normal speed.

Unfortunately, only one hit from a cannon, or two mines is all that's needed to turn your nimble little land rover into a heap of twisted metal. One nice point here is that, rather than have two jeeps running around at once, both people can get in the same jeep, with the person who entered first doing the driving. What a cute idea.

When you enter one of the side rooms, by way of blasting a hole in the door, the game goes into mode Eagles Nest. Using a plan view of the area you are in, you can see the POW's, shacked up in little cages, embedded in the walls, and the caches of gold laying around on the floor, just waiting to be walked over.

Graphics are great, with a very simple but effective colour system. Some very nice backdrops and extensive amounts of detail (such as the way when you grenade something, you make a nice hole in the floor, which stays there for the rest of the game) show that the programmers (Tony Crowther and David Bishop, no less) have really taken their time over this. I especially like the little ceremony at the end, where you are shown your CO placing medals on your coffin. You earn different medals for different things like the Purple Heart for wounds in battle or the Distinguished Service Cross for destroying vehicles.

Sound is simple but effective, with some great tunes and a particularly nice explosion sound effect.

Fernandez Must Die isn't a game that you can just pick up a joystick and play, but it's not an impossible task either. In the two days I had it, I played it a lot, and came very close to completing it (six bases to be exact) so I can't see it lasting very long, though there is the added challenge of rescuing all the POWs. A great game and well worth spending your money on.