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The Super Cobra feather-weight attack helicopter is humming ready for take-off. Its 20mm three barrel rotary cannon is smouldering for action. The laser-guided 'launch-and-say-goodbye-cruel-world' missiles are smoking in their silos. Ahead of you lies mile after mile of hostile graphics.

And they know you're coming.

Hmmmm, a suspiciously similar storyline to Thunder Blade Must be a coincidence.

You fly (in the jerky 3D scrolling sense of the word) your helicopter as the landscape pushes painfully under you. Enemy helicopters and warplanes limp out of the blank horizon, gradually approaching as growing lumps. You steer left and right with the landscape shifting with you, avoiding the clumps (missiles), blobs (bullets) and lolly-pop sticks (planes). The idea is to reach the end of the level and load the next scenario.

The graphics are poor - and I'm being a generous open-minded person to say that. Your propellors don't shift; the rear view of your copter is bleak and uninspiring; the enemy planes and choppers are just blocky pixels; and the landscapes are an indescribable mish-mash of graphics, which the Speccy attribute problem can only emphasise.

Playability -wise the key controls are fairly responsive, but the almost involuntary flip-over-and-fly-upside-down feature is instantly disorientating. Plus the fact that your chopper can easily become lost in the attribute/graphic soup, just didn't enamour me of the game at all!

Hellfire Attack is about as addictive as a corpuscle. The dire graphics, awful screen design, and sheer iccky-ness make it a likely candidate for the Mothball Substitute Of The Year Award.

An uninspired chopper game. Give it the chop.