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Fighter Pilot was the first true aeroplane flying simulation available on the market which was a truly realistic representation of flying a jet aircraft.

The man behind the game, designer and part owner of Digitial Integration Dave Marshall, is a qualified pilot and has made every effort to make the program as lifelike as possible.

Fighter Pilot is an incredibly complex program though. There are, for instance, 23 different keys that are used during a full game. The game is baesd on the McDonnell Douglas F15 Eagle fighter plane and includes air-to-air combat options in the program's menu.

At the beginning of the game you are given a list of different options ranging from take off and landing practice to airborne combat. There are also four levels of difficulty - sensibly I chose trainee level and the practice landing options.

Predictably, I crashed fairly rapidly on my first few attempts. Soon I was able to keep the plane under reasonable control but still hadn't mastered the art of landing in one piece. Either I was descending too quickly and hit the ground before I could get more thrust from the engine or I came into land too fast and had my undercarriage ripped away from me.

Fighter Pilot is an incredibly complex program - to do it full justice this review would have to take up several pages of the magazine. It is, in my opinion, the game with the most playability and the longest lasting appeal I have played on the Amstrad.

This, of course, doesn't mean that I would recommend it to every Amstrad owner. If you like to get straight into a game hardly even needing to glance at the instructions, just pick up your joystick and start firing, then Fighter Pilot is not the game for you. On the other hand, if you are willing to spare quite a few hours getting to know the game, you will have guaranteed yourself months of flying fun.