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A biting north-eastery wind swirls down the valley carrying the distant echo of anti-aircraft fire. Below, on the valley floor, a convoy of armoured trucks snakes its way up towards the fortress, aptly named Into The Eagle's Nest.

As a result of recent high enemy activity in such a strategically unimportant area, four of top mean were sent into The Nest to find out why it was suddenly crawling with the enemy.

Their orders were then to destroy the fortress but three were captured almost immediately. The fourth was able to place explosives in the key places throughout the fortress. Unfortunately he too was captured before the charges could be detonated.

Eagle's Nest is a four-way scrolling arcade adventure very much in the Gauntlet/Dandy/Druid mould but far superior to all three.

Set in a fortress heavily infested by enemy goons, that seem to reproduce at an alarming rate, our hero can run through corridors, into store rooms, toilets, bathrooms, motorbike sheds, interrogation rooms, and even the guards' lounge.

Eagle's Nest differs in two key areas from the other programs mentioned above.

Firstly, the scale of the graphics is far larger than Gauntlet where you can see a substantial area of the dungeons surrounding your character. Here you control a sprite perhaps six or eight times the size of those in Gauntlet and consequently he is seen in far more detail as are all the other characters and objects the Spectrum version in the "easy" mode) so you soon start to get a little short.

Fortunately, the fortress is strewn with green rectangular ammo dumps, each of which contain ten bullets. As with all objects in the game, just walking over an ammo dump is enough to pick up the bullets.

Apart from liberating your comrades and blowing the place to smithereens, your secondary mission is to reclaim as many treasures from the commander's private collection.

These include paintings, boxes of gems, vases, and pendants. Collecting treasure increases your score but has no other effect on the game.

The layout of the fortress is completely different in each of the versions because the programmers wanted to squeeze every drop out of each host machine.

Thus the C64 and Amstrad versions have four floors while Spectrum owners have eight storeys to blast their way through.

Lifts should be used with extreme discretion because, not only is there only one pass per floor, but also the doors you're just painstakingly unlocked will be locked again if you return to the floor you're about to leave.

If you've elected to blow up the fortress, you must locate and activate the hidden explosives on each floor. When rescuing the captives you must first find each one and lead them, one at a time, back to the ground floor and freedom.

Understandably, your rescued comrades are sometimes a little slow to floow you, having been shackled to a stone wall for a week, so be careful not to go too fast or there'll be lost off the screen.

On the minus side, the status column, on the Amstrad version, can only be seen when the game is paused. This makes it more difficult to succeed as you never know quite how many hits you've got in hand or whether you're about to fire your last shot.

Although there is a small chance you may experience slight flickering in certain situations in the Commodore version, it is more or less faultlessly produced and an exceedingly playable.

Overall, the Commodore version of Eagle's Nest is the best of the three.

The game can be played on two levels, either as a mindless blast with no overall plan of action, or as a mindless blast with some idea of how you've going to succeed. Highly recommended for arcade and arcade adeventure freaks everywhere!