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The first thing to be said about this game is that's it's not easy. Not that you'd want it to be, but I found it infuriatingly hard to get the hang of. Once you've done that though, you're faced with an excellent shoot-'em-up/pick-'em-up that has something of Scramble, Blue Thunder and Choplifter in its ancestry.

Your mission involves flying along a jagged landscape to the portals of the Draconis caves, entering the depths, rescuing eighteen stranded men and, finally destroying the dreaded Kralthans' Fort Apocalypse.

You start off by fuelling your helicopter - and a very generous helping you get too. Using your Navatron - a radar screen at the top of the display - you blast your way to those cave doors. Android-controlled 'robo-choppers' will confront you in the air, while on the ground the Kralthan tanks emit a stream of deadly, guided drone missiles. These things are very tricky to avoid, and the tanks themselves can only be destroyed by a direct hit on their tracks.

If you can survive all this stuff flying around, you can bomb through the cave doors and enter the underworld. On the first level you must rescue nine men.

On the next level down, the Crystalline Caves, you have to rescue a further nine men before you can get through to what the program notes refer to as 'the heart of darkness, Fort Apocalypse itself', which is destroyed by one 'well-aimed missile from your rocket copter.'

Underground there are the same dangers as above, but they are fewer in number. However, you are now faced with a series of shields, doors and dangerous chambers. Figuring out how to deal with these requires as much effort as getting into the caves in the first place.

Fort Apocalypse is well-presented, but suffers from flickery graphics and less than smooth scrolling. But, despite these drawbacks, it will give a lot of pleasure to zappers of the old school.

This is a shoot-'em-up game requiring close joystick control and a vicious streak.

Graphics are large and colourful on the whole but perhaps lacking in detail. Sound is brash and healthy, with plenty of white noise scattered around. Control is fairly good with the joystick, even though at some stages of the game it is a little too easy to lose lives.

The game is reasonably good but it didn't have me glued to the TV screen for long. There is nothing stupendously new or exciting about it. It is essentially an underground Choplifter but there's always something happening on screen so you may enjoy it.

Fairly detailed and smoothly scrolling graphics give the game that much realism over others of this type on the market (Your chopper is even affected by gravity!). Pretty good sound. On your way to destroy the fort, you will encounter some very difficult hazards. It can be very frustrating being destroyed halfway through your quest and having to work all the way back.