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Martech's Hellfire Attack is a scrolling shoot-'em-up not... ah, 100% unlike certain other high profile shoot-'em-ups you will be seeing and reading about in the run up to Christmas.

You play the pilot of a Supercobra attack helicopter flying against wave after wave of enemy fighter jets, choppers and missiles. The scrolling isn't perfect, with many of these jumping towards you in a steady series of jerks rather than getting progressively larger, but since even such games as Victory Run on the PC Engine suffer from the same fault, it is forgivable.

Whoever played designer on this game must have visited some pretty strange places, however, as the first two levels consist of a bizarre combination of woods, castles and Manchester-style terraced suburbia, with level three showing a rather radical interpretation of what we would normally think of as oil rigs. In other words, none of the backdrops resemble anything that could be confused with reality, and thus far from being an "arcade simulation" of an attack chopper it occupies the strange limbo between the world as we know it and pure fantasy. No attempt is made to suggest why we should spend ten minutes shooting up Coronation Street before being whisked immediately into a frozen polar seascape, and so the obvious inference is that they have had trouble trying to interpret the complex sprite movements this sort of game requires onto even a 16 bit machine, and so have let the "concept" of the thing go to pot.

"Heads Up!" reads the legend as your copter rises into the air at the start of Level One, the rotors making a harsh whirr and the gunsight hovering a few inches above you. The guns fire automatically the moment you are airborne, and with rearmament stops between the level there is no danger of running out of ammo. Your joystick buttons allow you to fire extra rockets, and the space bar on the computer gives you turbo boost with a decidedly unhandy flick of the heel. Honestly, this would have been far better incorporated into the joystick with a double click or something - no-one wants to have to take their eyes off the screen and one hand off the stick.

And whatever its other faults, there is no way you could fairly accuse this game of being slow. Waves of copters rush towards you, and while in the early levels it isn't too hard to avoid them by skirting around the edges of the screen, you can't count on this technique for long. With a homing missile nearly always right on your tail, it is impossible to use the centre of the screen for fear of it connecting. This can force you into a corner and... Whammo! It would take some hot shot flying to stay in one piece against the whole barrage of attackers.

Hellfire Attack isn't too bad a game - I enjoyed some of the backgrounds and the frenetic action was sort of fun.