Up and away

The first Interdictor flight simulator featured stunning 3D graphics and an absorbing gameplay that made it more than just a mindless shoot-'em-up - strategy and tactics were needed.

Well, Interdictor II takes the whole thing a stage further. The graphics are better, there are more details in the landscape, more types of enemy to deal with and more strategy needed to overcome the opposition.

In the original you were required to move up a river valley taking airfields and forcing back the enemy. Now the field of play is laid out as a 3 x 3 square covering nearly 4,000 square miles of hills, rivers, lakes, railways and roads.

You start in the middle at airfield Alpha and work your way in a clockwise spiral through Beta, Gamma, Delta, Epsilon, Zeta, Eta, Theta and finally Iota. In each area you must take the airfield and destroy various installations. The ultimate goal is to demolish the power station near Iota.

As before, your plane is armed with cannon, rockets and sidewinder air-to-air missiles, and each time you capture an airfield you are backed up by two more spare planes. Against you are fighter planes with the same firepower as you, transporter planes carrying trucks, tanks, ships, anti-aircraft guns, surface-to-air radar guided missiles.

It's all linked together with the usual complexity and interaction between the elements. The airfields house enemy planes and are re-stocked by trucks. The transporter planes carry trucks into the area controlled by you and drop them, and the fighters protect the transporters.

The game starts easily, as Beta airfield is unguarded and has no planes, Gamma has a single plane and an ack-ack, Delta has a transporter plane, and so on.

One major addition over the original is the introduction of the flying brick. This indestructible, completely non-aerodynamic object can be used to fly around and look at the landscape. You can use it to play the game, but the save game facility doesn't work once it has been selected.

Interdictor II is hard, but it's the best flight simulator on a home micro and it makes a superb game.

Lazarus